Set Aside the Airport Success Studies: What Does Success Look Like to Young People Now? | 100 Big Questions About Life

Six forms of success in disguise, produced by commercial triumph and individualism.

Success is a comparison. Stretch the timeline back far enough: primitive humans lived by hunting, in a world short of everything, and the measure of success was obvious — whoever caught more game, whoever stockpiled more food and held more territory, was more successful. Under slavery and under farming, when large numbers of people still could not meet their basic bodily needs, whoever owned more slaves, more fields and bigger harvests, more wives and concubines, was held in higher regard. Somewhere in there humans invented power and money as tokens for redeeming resources: more power and more wealth meant more of the goods you needed to survive, and so more success.

Later, those in power used ideologies like "honor" to steer the direction of success, and titles — hero, nobleman, knight — became its markers. In the first half of 20th-century China, the identity young people prized shifted one after another: May Fourth youth, anti-Japanese youth, progressive youth, democratic youth, revolutionary youth, and finally the patriotic youth who "studied for the rise of China." Shouting slogans could genuinely stir up pride back then, because it made you feel more advanced than the "backward" people around you.

By the time commercial society arrived, young people had stopped believing the pie in the sky that governments and entrepreneurs painted for them. "Heaven rewards the diligent," "education changes your fate," "work hard and you'll live well" — none of it sounds convincing next to the daily social-media parade of people getting rich overnight and famous in an afternoon. After the 1990s, as material life grew richer, the highly politicized search for a youth identity turned into expectations of wealth and entertainment.

So individualism rose, and in an age when everyone is a narcissist, hardly anyone can achieve real success. The political and media power that once held the right to define success has been diluted by the internet. Redefining success has passed to individuals and to internet platforms. Among labor contractors on construction sites, success is defined by the rules of livestreaming platforms and measured in how much money you tip a female streamer. Or take the Weibo influencers who routinely carry tens of millions of followers: by Weibo's own measure of success — follower count — such a person is unquestionably successful, but only some people treat them as an idol worth admiring, and plenty of Weibo users think nothing of them.

The definition of success has also blurred because a whole set of yardsticks has blurred. Take the line between elite and grassroots: as ordinary people gained a voice online, elite refined taste lost every advantage over popular vulgar taste, and by now you can't really say what is vulgar and what is refined. Take the line between adults and children: because internet information is visible to everyone at once, children no longer have to level up through a game-like process to "grow up and learn some sense"; young people today care more about their own feelings and are less willing to hold themselves in check the way an "adult" is supposed to, which has produced infantilized adults and adult-like children. Take the line between men and women: feminism has, deliberately or not, kept shrinking the social differences between the sexes, and the internet gives men and women huge amounts of the same information — the same topics to argue about, the same material to watch — which has made androgyny fashionable. Or take the blurred line between work and life: the internet freed work from geography, work then invaded life, and any scrap of spare time can now be called overtime.

In the past, a man would not have compared his skin with a woman's; a 30-year-old who heard that a 10-year-old had started a company would more likely have thought "the boy shows promise, the future looks bright" than felt outcompeted; a Harvard lawyer would not have stooped to debate a rapper on a variety show. What success consists of has shifted from what you have in your life to how you live it. The airport-bookstore school of success studies has come to look like workplace chicken soup nobody wants. Success has turned plural, but in the wider context some obvious templates are still visible. Besides the business and political grandees who stand for wealth and fame, young people today probably also work from these samples of success:

1. Filter Success Studies: Not Just Your Looks — Your Whole Life Has to Look Good

In the days of "women hold up half the sky," society urged women into the workforce and played down differences between the sexes; men and women alike wore plain worker-and-peasant Mao suits. After reform and opening-up, economic growth let commerce start stressing those differences again: women needed to be feminine (so they needed to buy things), men needed to be masculine (so they needed to buy things). Today's merchants pushing women to be exquisite and beautiful and to "love yourself," while savaging "straight-man taste," come out of the same consumer logic.

In the age of social media, beauty gets stressed harder still, because it is the most direct to display, the easiest to spread and the most profitable. Feminists once cried out against "the objectification of women," arguing that women were stuck permanently in the position of object, a thing for men to look at. Now, facing women with money to spend, boy bands and male idol-training shows are manufactured in batches, and plenty of men can't wait to be objectified themselves — to be labeled with one persona or another and rated by netizens.

Guy Debord argues in The Society of the Spectacle that in a consumer society a person's identity is defined mainly through consumption, and that the consumption people are most devoted to is looking. "In our era, people prefer the image to the thing, the copy to the original, the representation to the reality, the appearance to the being." Where the visual rules and appearance is king, social media quietly teaches one rule: mermaid or Cinderella, prince or stable boy, only beauty gets you happiness and love. Young people have thrown out "don't judge by appearances" as casually as they threw out "don't be greedy for money."

This visual logic doesn't stop at faces and clothes. "Lifestyle" itself is pushed hard at consumers as a selling point. A quality breakfast, a fine afternoon tea, an evening of scented candles — each is a perfect window for a photo to post to Moments. The much-praised fitness trend looks like a case for healthy exercise, but research shows that fitness content actually stresses appearance over health, and often carries messages designed to make you feel guilty.

But who cares whether the photo was taken by the drainage ditch outside your compound gate or at some hotel in Romania, or whether that beautiful, cool pose will twist your ankle or damage your health. That people need to appear authentic does not mean people actually care about authenticity.

2. Single Success Studies: From "She Married Well" to "I'm Single and I Like It"

In the past, "did she marry well" served as a gauge of a woman's worth, and a single woman was assumed to be short on charm — not pretty enough, or flawed somewhere. The fashion among young people now is to live for themselves; they are no longer willing to sacrifice themselves for a family, or even for love. Not for their parents, and not for the next generation either: this cohort has stopped talking about filial piety and a house full of descendants, and doesn't mind cutting the thread of continuity that carries the past forward into the future, one generation to the next. Pressed by their parents to marry, they ask back: why get married at all?

This single fashion shows up in more than falling marriage and birth rates. On social media everyone runs their own image the way an agency runs an idol. The most popular people make no effort to convince their readers of anything; they hold readers with a fake self-exposure. They don't need to be understood. They want to be doted on.

As John Berger has it in Ways of Seeing, "we never look at just one thing; we are always looking at the relation between things and ourselves." Single idols are more popular because they better satisfy what their fans feel.

Besides, even if being single is neither as abnormal as the public assumes nor as glossy and pure as feminism's supporters claim, an older woman "unbound by marriage, brave enough to be herself" is easy to hold up as a model in an age of loving yourself. Worth noting: such models are not entirely spontaneous either; they are as much a persona built by public opinion. Someone who once in a while pays attention to living alone and being single on social media will soon be buried in algorithm-fed articles on the subject — and that's when you find out how many people are out there writing about being single.

3. Self-Improvement Success Studies: Forever in the Run-Up to Success

Unlike young Japanese, who are "satisfied with the present and thoroughly pessimistic about the future," young Chinese tend to "complain about the present and stay quite optimistic about the future." They stake their hopes on the future — some sector where the wind is blowing, some lottery draw, some new policy. Lines like "you should still have a dream, in case it comes true" and "I have to keep improving myself so I'll be worthy of the you I meet one day" are common sights on social media.

So the age of individualization has produced a curious success-studies fashion: keep improving yourself, keep investing in yourself, convert that investment on schedule, run your one life with care. That running of a life often shows up as self-quantification: today, 0.9 milligrams of vitamin A, five pages of vocabulary, eight books a week, 300 kilometers a month, 5,000 slides a year. All of it looks like preparation for some future success, but there is no concrete thing the success attaches to. You are permanently in the run-up.

This is also tied to the entrepreneurs the media wheels out whenever success comes up. In the early 20th century, one mark of a successful person was plenty of leisure to spend on art, philosophy and music. In today's age of commercial triumph, the model of success is the founder who is always busy: the busier you are, the likelier you are to be "changing the world and creating value." "Busy" has become the badge of the successful, while free time is more likely to mean "you're slacking, you have no job, someone is passing you." So when someone complains to you about overtime, about being busy, busy, busy, they are usually complaining and bragging at once. Busyness has become a form of success in itself, to the point that many young people think about improving themselves all the time and can no longer enjoy doing nothing without guilt. The open lectures, fitness classes and reading classes sold as self-improvement fill exactly this need for the appearance of growth.

4. Genetic Success Studies: The Hard Metrics of Big Success — Background, Class, Genes

The internet, and its doxxing culture, has spread the measures of a person's success into every corner of life; any dark spot in a history can become evidence for doubting someone. Once people are used to knowing a person through the labeled scraps the internet shows them, they judge the person by what those labels imply. They work out: their body is an accumulation of daily habits, and keeping in shape means they manage themselves well. They post an oil painting with clumsy technique: they have plenty of free time and care about artistic cultivation. They come from rural Shaanxi: they have probably seen a real pig. Whatever the guesses, "success" won by hard work from a low starting point is not exactly scorned — but the internet has stretched people's frame of comparison from those around them to the influencers at the top of the pyramid, and resent-the-rich talk has gradually gone quiet among the young. A good background now means good upbringing, a broad view, refined taste.

5. Winning-Lying-Down Success Studies: Lying Back Where the Era's Wind Blows

He bought bitcoin in 2013, or an apartment in 2005, and reached financial freedom in a single move. She reposted one Weibo post and won a prize worth over 100 million yuan. He opened twenty WeChat official accounts during the platform's boom years, reposted on all of them every day, and bought three apartments in a year.

Fast technological change and fast-turning "business winds" have brought a run of uncertainty, so words like "boom period," "where the wind blows" and "winning lying down" get thrown around constantly.

Reposting the lucky koi caught on partly for social reasons, but also because in front of those unreachable influencers under the spotlight, people know perfectly well that effort is useless and still can't stop making the effort. Faced with success that doesn't match their own experience — the model who trips on the runway and gets more work for it, the girl-group idol who can neither sing nor dance — people are glad to put it down to luck, and glad to hear lucky stories, because that means they have a shot too. In the end, luck may be the only weight an ordinary person can put on the scale to catch up with the influencers.

6. Salted-Fish Success Studies: Self-Mockery to the Death

"Dig a few more shovels of coal and you end up a coal-mine boss? Someone living on 20 yuan a day works hard to become someone living on 200 yuan a day. Set against someone born living on a million yuan a day, does your struggle mean anything?"

"I struggle my whole life, and all I'm doing is fertilizing myself, making my own chive leaves longer and greener, waiting for the people at the top of the pyramid to harvest me in the autumn."

"What's wrong with living like a salted fish? Eight books a week, 300 kilometers a month, 5,000 slides a year, reading and working out and working hard, then signing up for classes on handling social obligations, on gambling-style speculation, on digging into startup risk and competitive advantage — that full-blooded life is fine, of course, but I find it a lot of trouble. All I need is shows to watch and games to play."

Sengoku Tamotsu argues in The Collapse of Seriousness (《认真的崩溃》) that postwar Japan's social ethic was hard work, endurance and self-sacrifice; the country's goal was unified, and earnestness, the ideology of an industrial society, carried Japan from a wrecked, defeated nation to the world's second largest by gross national product. After the economy grew, Japan turned from a producing society into a consuming one, and the value of "endurance" fell apart. "'People shouldn't have to endure' is a value buried deep in the hearts of Japanese youth. Young people don't want to endure; they want to do whatever they like." China shows the same trend now: young people change jobs often, quit the moment something rubs them wrong, go freelance, and call themselves salted fish, deadbeats and chives, or sang — listless and defeated. Worried about falling behind the times, and in fact falling behind, they have stopped chasing the success trend at all. So the salted fish reach a kind of "success" of their own: by refusing to compare themselves with anyone, they make it impossible for anyone to win against them.

Illustrations: Zheng Shuya