Dear Nick,

“We don’t feel like what we thought our fathers felt like when we looked up at them as children,” you wrote, and that captured the heart of the matter for me.

That “a mortgage, two cars and 2.7 kids” has remained a definition of success for so long is a tribute to the same sort of marketing genius that required a cultural history of the 1950s and early ‘60s to be wrapped up in the neat package of Mad Men. It had to be an advertising firm.

There was even a sense then, as was once reported to me by someone who lived it as a father of three, that “in 1953, buying the house was not only an opportunity, but we regarded getting a mortgage almost a duty,” and he didn’t mean just a duty to his kids. Having that mortgage, those three kids and, yes (at least by 1966) two cars rose almost to the level of a statement of patriotism. It was a kind of a national security against the demons of Depression memories.

Funding all of those obligations was a “career,” and please note that “career” is a notion precisely as old, and only as old, as “consumer credit” is. The mid-century young “professional,” the new hope of the nation’s future, came with a ready-made life-story template and a freshly-minted credit card.

Well, of course, it was all an illusion. A comforting one for a struggling white middle class in so far as it appeared to plot out a definition of “better.” Comforting for the credit markets. But it was also a demanding illusion, and — need I say it? — the illusion has been making its back-end demands for some time now. It is making some especially serious ones presently.

And, all the while, the illusion left more people out of the Dream than in.

There may be an American Dream, but that version was never its proper definition. Time to put it on the shelf, next to the other, older myth of the yeoman farmer, another myth that comforted the few, demanded more of more, and purposefully left out the many.

But what the many has known all along is that few of us have careers; most of us have gigs. That paying the bills — whether or not the pile includes a mortgage payment, car loan payment or a bill for kids’ shoes — paying the bills is not a feeble definition of success.

By the way, I find myself channeling my father here. Never carried a mortgage. During the Depression, never turned down a one-week-long gig. Left school after 4th grade but finished high school part-time evenings, at forty. Never measured up, he believed, to his (early-century version) professional, mortgage-carrying father’s judgments of success.

Let me propose this: that it is neither career nor educational attainment, not occupational status nor where that occupation is carried out, but plain competence at living and working that should stand as the proper measurement.

Posted by
G.E. “Skip” Lawrence