I watched a lot of game shows as a kid in the late 80s. Not the obvious ones like Wheel of Fortune or The Price is Right. I watched odd ones like Supermarket Sweep or that crazy one with the DOUBLE WHAMMY (I googled it, it was called Press Your Luck.)
Those shows usually aired in the mornings, so I either watched them on weekends or, as I suspect, skipped a lot of school with Ferris Bueller-inspired fake colds that my largely busy and distracted mom believed. I remember being offended when I found out winners had to pay taxes on what they won. It was, I suspect, the earliest hint I had that winning wasn’t that straightforward.
Around that time, I developed a fascination for reading stories about lottery winners. The Mega jackpot millionaires and what they did with all that money. I’d fantasize about what I would do. Would I take the lump payment? The thing that stuck with me the most was learning how poorly things had gone for many of the winners years after the win.
I turned 40 in 2020, and like many pandemic milestones, it sucked. The careful edifice of bullshit I’d built my 30s on collapsed in one fell swoop, and the nearly 2 years, 8 months, and 1 week since then have been spent doing what mid-life crisis-experiencing gen-x/milennials do; therapy, yoga, better eating, new doctors, all mixed with moments of severe ennui as I looked back on what I’d previously believed where my very successful 30s. You see, I started a creative studio, worked with talented people, and kept it all going for a decade. I had a nice office in the hip area of the city, lots of cool gadgets, a bar in my office (because I watched too much Mad Men and embraced the cliche), and the deep-seated belief that things would continue on an upward trajectory because I’d had some early wins. They did not, and I more or less hit the 10-year anniversary of my studio by skidding to that finish line. The office was gone (we went remote during the pandemic), and I had a U-storage unit to hold the excess gadgets.
It was not a failure; my 30s were not a failure, but it sure as fuck didn’t feel like SUCCESS.
I found myself pondering the nature of “not success.” I had things to be proud of, and I could connect with gratitude about some of it, but it didn’t quite add up to success.
It felt more like an unsuccess. From the underutilized root of the very well-worn “unsuccessful,” which things are ALL the time. Unsuccessful things are usually considered failures, but an unsuccess, maybe that could be something else.
So there it is the namesake of this blog and a space where I hope to explore the in-betweens. Not failures but not quite success is, in many ways, the broken promise of the future millennials were taught to expect. So I don’t own a home, but I did get a Bluesky invite from Craig Mod two weeks ago, and Niel Gaiman liked two of my “tweets.”