The Narrowing

On Success, Visibility, and the Impoverishment of the American Good Life

Most Americans are living lives that would once have been called successful.

They have degrees their grandparents never imagined earning, jobs that provide stability, homes with climate control, access to medical care and information that would have seemed miraculous in 1950.

By any reasonable historical measure, they are doing well.

And yet a diffuse sense of inadequacy hangs in the air. A quiet suspicion of falling short. A feeling that the life being lived is somehow not enough.

These facts should not coexist. If they do, something deeper than economics is at work.

We have changed the definition of success.

In contemporary America, a successful life no longer means steadiness, contribution, or modest prosperity. It means distinction.

Admission to a shrinking circle of elite institutions. Entry into prestige professions. Financial independence at levels far above median income. Creative breakthrough. Public visibility. A platform. Influence.

To live well is to stand out.

The problem is not envy. It is arithmetic.

Only a small fraction of people can occupy these positions. Elite outcomes are scarce by design. And yet we treat them as normal benchmarks of adult achievement. We have built a moral order around goals that most citizens cannot possibly attain.

Freddie deBoer has argued that the American model of success has narrowed in precisely this way—shrinking from a broad, attainable standard to a rarefied ideal available to few.

If he is right, then the pervasive anxiety of middle-class life is not private neuroses but a structural outcome. We have constructed a culture in which even the objectively fortunate feel like failures.

This essay takes that provocation seriously. It asks how the horizon of the good life contracted, why we accepted a definition of success that requires scarcity, and what it would mean to recover a model of human flourishing that is both ambitious and democratic.

What We Once Meant by Success — and What We Also Meant

To understand what has been lost, we need to begin by recovering what once existed. Yet we cannot do so nostalgically or simplistically.

Intellectual honesty requires acknowledging from the outset that the ancient world did not speak with a single voice on this question. It was, in fact, profoundly divided — and the tensions within it are far more illuminating than any flattened account of one side or the other.

The Greece that gave us philosophy also gave us Homer. And Homer’s world was not Aristotle’s. The Iliad and the Odyssey are organized around ideals that are explicitly aristocratic, explicitly exceptional, and explicitly oriented toward immortality through heroic achievement.

Achilles is presented with a choice — a short life of extraordinary glory, or a long life of ordinary obscurity — and the poem leaves no serious doubt about which the heroic code values.

Kleos — fame, glory, the reputation that outlasts death — is the supreme good in the Homeric universe, and it is available only to those who distinguish themselves through extraordinary deeds in war or adventure.

The ordinary soldier, the competent farmer, the faithful wife — these figures appear in Homer, but they are not its heroes, and the poem does not pretend that their lives represent the highest form of human achievement.

This is, in many respects, the founding tradition of Western literature and Western ideals of greatness. The Romans inherited it and intensified it: virtus, in its original sense, was martial excellence, the quality that distinguished the great man from the merely decent one.

The Roman biographical tradition, from Plutarch’s Lives onward, was explicitly organized around exceptional individuals — the generals, the statesmen, the philosophers — whose achievements placed them outside the ordinary run of human experience and whose memory deserved to be preserved as models for emulation.

The aspiration to leave a lasting mark on the world, to be remembered, to achieve something that would outlast one’s own brief life — this was not a modern invention. It was a central preoccupation of ancient culture, and it shaped the Western tradition’s understanding of what a fully realized human life might look like.

So the first point must be this: the valorization of exceptional achievement, of heroism, of the kind of outstanding performance that earns one a place in collective memory — this is old. It is not the specific cultural pathology of late capitalism or social media. It is part of the inheritance we have been working with since the beginning.

And yet — and here is where the ancient world becomes genuinely interesting rather than simply confirmatory — the ancient world also produced powerful counter-traditions that challenged the heroic ideal and offered different accounts of what living well required.

Aristotle, writing in deliberate contrast to the aristocratic ethos of his culture, argued in the Nicomachean Ethics that eudaimonia — genuine flourishing — was not the property of the exceptional few but the proper end of every human being, achievable through the cultivation of virtue and the exercise of characteristically human capacities in the context of a good community.

For Aristotle, the life of the great general or the celebrated statesman was not automatically superior to the life of the thoughtful craftsman or the loving parent. What mattered was not the scale of one’s achievements but the quality of one’s character and the degree to which one’s life expressed the full range of human excellence.

Flourishing was not restricted to the few.

The Stoics went further, developing a tradition of thought that was radically egalitarian in its moral implications. The Stoic claim — that the only genuine good is virtue, and that virtue is available to every rational being regardless of external circumstance — was a direct challenge to the heroic tradition’s assumption that the good life required exceptional external achievement.

Epictetus, who had been a slave, argued that inner freedom was available to him as fully as to any emperor. Marcus Aurelius, who was an emperor, argued that his imperial position added nothing essential to the good life and that what mattered was the quality of his inner responses to circumstance.

The good life, on this account, was radically scalable — independent of wealth, status, recognition, or the particular outcomes of one’s worldly endeavors.

This ancient tension — between the Homeric ideal of heroic exceptionality and the Aristotelian and Stoic ideals of universal flourishing — has run through Western culture ever since, producing and reproducing the very conflict that deBoer identifies in contemporary American life.

We have always held both ideals simultaneously. We have celebrated the exceptional and insisted on the dignity of the ordinary. The question is not which tradition is right in the abstract but which one has come to dominate in practice — and what the consequences of that dominance have been.

The Protestant Inheritance and the Moralization of Success

What is distinctively modern — and distinctively American — is not the valorization of exceptional achievement as such, which is ancient, but the specific way in which worldly success became morally significant: not merely admirable, but indicative of inner worth.

This transformation has a precise historical origin that Max Weber traced with great care in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905).

The Calvinist doctrine of predestination — the terrifying idea that God had, from eternity, determined which souls would be saved and which damned, and that nothing a human being could do would alter that determination — created a psychological problem of almost unbearable intensity.

If election could not be earned, how could one live with the uncertainty of not knowing whether one was among the saved? Weber’s argument was that Calvinist communities gradually developed a response to this anxiety that was, in retrospect, historically momentous: the idea that worldly success, understood as the fruit of disciplined, methodical labor in one’s calling, could be read as a sign — not a cause, but a sign — of divine favor.

The prosperous merchant, the disciplined craftsman, the person whose industry was visibly and reliably rewarded — these figures became, in the Protestant imagination, outward evidence of an inward grace.

This linkage between material success and moral worth is the crucial mutation that distinguishes the American tradition from both the classical heroic tradition and the classical philosophical tradition.

The Homeric hero sought glory through exceptional deeds; his greatness was a matter of what he did and how he did it, not of whether he prospered. The Aristotelian good person sought flourishing through virtue; whether they were rich or poor was largely beside the point.

But the Protestant-derived American tradition fused moral worth with worldly success in a way that made prosperity itself a form of virtue.

And once that fusion was accomplished, its secular descendants — the self-help tradition, the meritocratic ideology, the gospel of individual achievement — could inherit the moral structure while discarding the theology. The Market replaced God, but the logic remained: success means you deserve it, and failure means you don’t.

The secularized version of this logic is the American Dream in its various formulations, and its consequences have compounded across centuries in ways that deBoer’s argument helps us see clearly.

When worldly success is not merely admirable but morally significant — when it says something about the person who achieves it — then the failure to achieve it says something too.

The anxiety, the quiet despair, the sense of having fallen short of something essential: these are the predictable consequences of a moral framework that has defined ordinary, decent, competent lives as insufficient.

The Rise of Meritocracy and Its Discontents

The twentieth century gave this logic its modern institutional form. The expansion of higher education, the formalization of credentialing systems, the development of standardized testing and professional certification — all of these were presented, and to a significant degree experienced, as democratizing forces.

Michael Young, the British sociologist who coined the word “meritocracy” in his 1958 satirical novel The Rise of the Meritocracy, intended it as a warning. He saw, with uncomfortable clarity, that a society distributing status according to measured ability would be one in which those at the bottom had no one to blame but themselves — and in which those at the top would feel entirely entitled to their position, having earned it.

Young’s warning was largely ignored, and meritocracy became the organizing ideology of postwar liberal societies. The philosopher Michael Sandel, in The Tyranny of Merit (2020), has argued compellingly that its costs have been severe and underappreciated. When success is understood as earned, failure is understood as deserved.

What is concealed in this logic is the enormous role of circumstances — of family wealth, of social capital, of geographic accident, of the specific abilities that happen to be valued in a particular labor market at a particular historical moment — in determining who wins and who loses.

The meritocratic system sorts people efficiently. It does not sort them justly.

By presenting its outcomes as just, meritocacy naturalizes inequality and transforms what is actually a distribution of social advantages into an apparent distribution of human worth.

This is the intellectual context within which deBoer’s argument operates.

He is not simply making an economic observation about the concentration of wealth and opportunity at the top of American society, though that observation is accurate and important.

He is making a moral observation: that the cultural definition of success has come to track elite meritocratic outcomes so closely that it has ceased to offer any meaningful affirmation to the vast majority of people who live decent, competent, caring lives without attaining those outcomes.

The heroic ideal, always present in Western culture, has been fused with the Protestant moralization of success and institutionalized through meritocratic sorting — producing a cultural framework that is more demanding, more pervasive, and more damaging than any of its predecessors.

The New Vocabulary of Success

The specific vocabulary in which contemporary American success is discussed is itself revealing. Consider how recently phrases like “follow your passion,” “build your brand,” “disrupt the industry,” “scale your impact,” and “change the world” became the ordinary language of career advice and self-help culture.

These are not simply encouragements to work hard or cultivate excellence. They encode a particular vision of what a successful life looks like — one defined by exceptional outcomes, by the creation of something new and large rather than the faithful performance of something existing and necessary, by visible impact rather than quiet contribution.

The historian Warren Susman observed, in his 1984 collection Culture as History, a fundamental shift in American self-conception that had occurred over the early twentieth century — a shift from a “character culture” to a “personality culture.”

In the nineteenth century, the dominant moral vocabulary emphasized character: duty, integrity, honor, manners, work. These were qualities that were cultivated in private and expressed in behavior, and their value was largely independent of whether they were observed or recognized.

The twentieth century produced a new ideal — the magnetic, compelling, attention-commanding personality — that was oriented toward public impression rather than private virtue. Success, in this new vocabulary, required not just doing well but being seen doing well. The inner life mattered less than the projected self.

Social media has taken this tendency and placed it on a technological infrastructure of extraordinary power and reach. The quantification of attention — followers, likes, shares, views — has created a new metric of social worth that is, in important respects, more measurable and more emotionally compelling than older measures of success.

The teacher who has shaped hundreds of students over decades of dedicated work produces no metric that appears in anyone’s feed. The influencer with a monetized platform of modest scale produces numbers that are visible, comparable, and subject to the same algorithmic amplification that governs all digital content.

Visibility has become conflated with value in a manner so pervasive that it is difficult to notice unless you step back from it — at which point it becomes difficult to understand how we came to accept it so uncritically.

deBoer’s particular insight is that this development has not simply added a new form of success to the existing menu; it has displaced older forms of recognition that were once culturally substantial.

The dignity of craft — of mastering a trade and practicing it well over a lifetime — was once a genuine social achievement, honored in the culture of skilled labor and expressed in institutions like the guild and the union and the professional association.

The dignity of community contribution — of being the person who organized the neighborhood association, who served on the school board, who was known as reliable and decent by those in one’s immediate orbit — was once a form of social recognition with genuine moral weight.

These forms of recognition have not entirely disappeared, but they have been devalued relative to the new currencies of wealth, credentials, and visibility. And when they are devalued, the people who have achieved them — competently, faithfully, at real cost — are left without a cultural vocabulary to affirm what they have done.

Scarcity and the Mathematics of the Impossible

deBoer’s argument has a structural dimension that is easy to miss but essential to his case. The problem with the contemporary definition of success is not only that it is highly demanding but that it describes outcomes that are, by their nature, available only to a few.

Elite institutions admit a small fraction of applicants. Prestige professions employ a small fraction of the labor force. Large wealth is concentrated in a small fraction of the population. Cultural visibility of the kind that registers as genuine success — a significant audience, a public platform, a recognized name — is available only to a tiny minority of those who seek it.

This is not a contingent feature of the current moment that better policy could remedy. It is an inherent feature of the things being sought. Prestige is positional: it exists only relative to the many who lack it.

If everyone attended an elite institution, elite institutions would cease to be elite. If everyone had a large platform, large platforms would lose their significance. The goods being defined as constitutive of the good life are, by definition, goods that most people cannot have.

A culture that defines the good life in terms of positional goods has, in effect, defined the good life as unavailable to most people — and then told those people that their failure to attain it is a reflection of their choices and their character.

This is what makes the contemporary situation different, in degree if not entirely in kind, from earlier American ideals of success. The American Dream, in its classic postwar formulation, was expansive enough to be broadly achievable.

Home ownership, stable employment, a rising standard of living, education for one’s children — these were demanding goals, and they remained unavailable to many Americans, particularly Black Americans systematically excluded from postwar prosperity by discriminatory policy.

But they were not structurally scarce in the way that elite outcomes are scarce. They could, in principle, be universalized. A society in which everyone owned a home and had secure employment was imaginable as a goal. A society in which everyone attended an elite institution or had a significant public platform is not imaginable in the same way.

The new definition of success is built on foundations that make its universal attainment logically impossible.

The Psychological Costs of an Impossible Standard

The consequences of living within this framework are, as a substantial body of psychological research has documented, material and measurable. The sociologist Robert Merton, writing in the 1930s and 1940s, developed what he called “strain theory” to describe the psychological and social consequences of a disjunction between culturally valued goals and the legitimate means available for achieving them.

When a culture promotes universal goals but provides access to legitimate means of achieving them only to some, the result is predictable: those without access experience strain, and they respond to that strain in various ways — through conformity (continuing to pursue the goals through legitimate means despite limited prospects), through innovation (pursuing the goals through illegitimate means), through ritualism (abandoning the goals but continuing the routines), or through retreatism (abandoning both).

Merton was writing primarily about crime and deviance, but his framework applies with uncomfortable precision to the current situation. When the culturally validated goal is exceptional achievement — financial success, creative distinction, public visibility — and the legitimate means to those goals are distributed radically unequally, the result is a society in which a large majority of people experience a chronic low-grade sense of inadequacy that they are encouraged to interpret as personal rather than structural.

The anxiety, the quiet despair, the sense of having fallen short of something essential — these are not individual psychological failures. They are rational responses to an irrational cultural demand.

What is particularly insidious about the contemporary version of this dynamic is its interaction with social media’s infrastructure of comparison. Merton’s subjects compared themselves to their neighbors and their community; the gap between aspiration and achievement was visible but local.

Contemporary Americans compare themselves, continuously and algorithmically, to a curated selection of people who appear to be succeeding in exactly the ways the culture valorizes.

The comparison pool has expanded from the neighborhood to the entire connected world, while the comparison metric has narrowed to a few highly visible markers of the approved kind of success. The result is a machine for generating inadequacy on an industrial scale.

What Has Been Displaced

The great historical cost of this narrowing is not only psychological but cultural — the loss of the counter-narratives and alternative vocabularies that once provided genuine affirmation to lives lived outside the orbit of elite achievement.

The dignity of labor was once a substantial cultural and political ideal, institutionally supported and rhetorically honored.

The labor movement, at its height, offered a framework within which working-class life could be understood not as a failure to achieve something better but as a genuine achievement in its own right: the solidarity of shared work, the pride of craft, the collective exercise of democratic power in the workplace, the building of institutions — unions, mutual aid societies, community organizations — that served lasting purposes.

This was not simply propaganda. It was a genuine moral vocabulary that thousands of people used to make sense of their lives and find dignity in their circumstances.

That vocabulary has been largely displaced — by deindustrialization, by the decline of union membership, and by the cultural triumph of an individualist ideal of success that has little room for collective achievement or the dignity of physical labor.

The philosopher Matthew Crawford, in Shop Class as Soulcraft (2009), has written beautifully about what is lost when craft knowledge is devalued — the deep satisfaction of working directly with the physical world, of solving concrete problems with one’s hands and mind, of achieving mastery over a domain that resists mastery.

This is a real human good, and its devaluation is a real impoverishment — not only of the people who are denied the cultural recognition they deserve but of the broader society that loses the wisdom embedded in craft traditions.

Similarly, the moral vocabulary of community contribution — of being the person who shows up, who is reliable, who makes the immediate world around them slightly better — has weakened relative to the vocabulary of individual achievement and self-actualization.

The historian Robert Bellah and his colleagues documented this shift powerfully in Habits of the Heart (1985), tracing the decline of the civic and religious languages that once gave Americans a vocabulary for understanding themselves as members of communities rather than simply as individuals pursuing personal projects.

Without those languages, it is difficult to articulate why ordinary civic participation — attending meetings, volunteering, sustaining institutions — matters. And when it is difficult to articulate, it becomes difficult to sustain.

Recovery: Toward Plural Models of Flourishing

If the cultural definition of success has narrowed in the ways described above, what would it mean to broaden it? What resources — intellectual, cultural, political, institutional — might support a recovery of more plural, more democratic, more humanly adequate conceptions of the good life?

Part of the answer is intellectual, and it requires a recovery of traditions that have been marginalized by the dominant ideology of meritocratic achievement.

The Aristotelian tradition, with its insistence that flourishing is the proper end of every human being and that it is achievable through the cultivation of virtue and the exercise of characteristically human capacities, offers resources that have barely been tapped in contemporary public discourse.

The civic republican tradition, with its emphasis on participation, on the exercise of political freedom, on the goods that can only be achieved collectively, offers a corrective to the radical individualism of the current moment.

Even the religious traditions that have shaped American life contain, within their complex and contradictory legacies, powerful counter-narratives to the gospel of individual achievement — narratives about service, about community, about the moral significance of how one treats the people immediately around one, regardless of whether that treatment is visible or recognized.

Part of the answer is institutional. The devaluation of ordinary work has been accelerated by specific policy choices — the weakening of labor protections, the defunding of vocational education, the tax treatment of capital relative to labor — that could, in principle, be reversed.

The valorization of elite credentials has been reinforced by the enormous premium that the labor market places on particular kinds of educational background, a premium that reflects genuine skill differences in some cases and in others simply reflects the social capital embedded in elite networks.

Policies that reduce the economic penalty for not attending elite institutions would reduce, at the margin, the cultural pressure to define the good life in terms of elite credentialing.

But the most fundamental recovery, if it is possible, is cultural rather than institutional.

It requires the rebuilding of vocabularies — in families, in schools, in communities, in public discourse — that can affirm lives lived outside the orbit of exceptional achievement.

It requires recovering the language of craft, of community, of faithful contribution, of the ordinary decent life well lived.

It requires, in short, the willingness to say clearly what the dominant culture has largely stopped saying: that the good life does not require exceptional outcomes, that most people who live with integrity and care and competence and love are already living the good life, and that the persistent sense that this is not enough is not a personal failing but a cultural imposition that deserves to be resisted.

The philosopher Harry Frankfurt, in his essay “Equality as a Moral Ideal,” argued that what matters morally is not whether people have the same as others but whether people have enough — whether their needs are met and their lives are going well by a standard not defined by comparison.

This is a useful corrective to the logic of positional competition that drives the narrowing deBoer describes.

The question worth asking is not how one’s life compares to the curated best-case presentations of others but whether one’s life contains what actually matters: meaningful work, genuine relationships, sufficient security, the sense of contributing to something beyond oneself.

The Deeper Question

deBoer’s provocation leads, ultimately, to the oldest question in moral philosophy: What does it mean to live well? It is a question that every serious philosophical tradition has tried to answer, and the answers have been richer, more varied, and more democratic than the contemporary American cultural consensus suggests.

Few major traditions of moral thought have treated exceptional achievement or public recognition as the primary measure of a life well lived. Some have admired excellence, honor, or even greatness. But even where distinction is valued, it is rarely the sole or central criterion of human flourishing.

More commonly, the good life has been located in the quality of one’s relationships, the cultivation of character, the faithful discharge of responsibilities, and the ability to inhabit one’s particular circumstances with purpose and self-knowledge.

Whether in Aristotelian ethics, classical republicanism, religious moral traditions, or more modern accounts of dignity and self-realization, flourishing is typically understood as something worked out within ordinary human limits — in family, friendship, vocation, and community — rather than as a function of visibility, scale, or renown.

Greatness may be admired. But it is not usually required.

The contemporary narrowing of success represents not an advance beyond these traditions but a regression from them — a retreat into a more primitive and more impoverished conception of human worth, one that reduces the complex question of how to live to the single metric of competitive achievement.

Recovering from that regression requires not the abandonment of excellence as a value but its recontextualization — the insistence that excellence takes many forms, that most of those forms are not visible on any platform or legible to any algorithm, and that the lives in which they are expressed are not diminished by their invisibility.

The ladder to the good life has not merely become narrower and steeper. It has been pointed in the wrong direction. The task is not to climb more efficiently but to recognize that the destination it leads to — wealth, prestige, visibility, brand — is not, in fact, where the good life is found.

That recognition will not come easily in a culture built on the opposite message. Everywhere we turn, we are told that standing out is what makes a life matter — that distinction, visibility, and achievement are the real measures of worth. To question that feels almost irresponsible.

But older traditions understood something simpler and sturdier. A good life was not measured by fame or status, but by character, steadiness, contribution, and depth. That understanding has not disappeared. It survives in philosophy, in faith, in ordinary families, and in the quiet lives of people who are decent, responsible, and unknown.

And still the intuition keeps surfacing — at dinner tables, in therapy offices, in late-night conversations among people who look successful on paper. The sense that something is off. That we have been taught to measure ourselves in ways that make almost everyone feel behind.

It is the realization that when a culture defines success as distinction, most people will feel inadequate — no matter how well they are actually doing. It is the recognition that we have tied dignity to rank.

What we are calling a crisis of confidence may be, at least in part, a crisis of measurement.

And the solution is not better strategies for climbing higher. It is the willingness to ask whether the ladder is leaning against the right wall.

That intuition does not need to be managed or medicated away. It needs to be taken seriously.

Because it is telling us something true.