Just wrote this thing earlier this AM about drinking to excess and why people (myself included) do it, and had another concept I wanted to try out on Medium. Eventually if this has any resonance for people, I probably need to turn it into a fancy graphic, but for now we’re going to try and tackle it with words.
A little bit similar to “The Three Tiers Of Work and Life,” but I’m thinking there are three prisms that determine your relative success and failure between your 20s and 50s. Those would be:
- Your definitions of success: This could be to be an influencer, make x-money, big house, nice car, volunteer a lot, travel a lot, have a big family, live near your mom, take care of your sister, etc.
- Your quality of relationships and how you like to receive love: This is kind of the intersection of “Love Languages” stuff and overall “Loneliness is akin to smoking 15 cigs a day” stat lines. This is where I would strip common tropes like “Work ethic!” because you can have a great work ethic, and great definitions of success, but work ethic sans relationships and sans understanding of what you need emotionally probably won’t get you very far. I guess the opposite would be sociopaths, which maybe is a flaw in this model, although sociopaths can theoretically “form” relationships, they’re just not super real.
