In the 90s, we internalised an ideal of cool that appeared nonchalant and effortless. Now, young people are unafraid to say they want something and are going to work hard to get it
O
h no, striving is cool now. “Never stop grinding and listen … Stop doing anything else but working,” as Pharrell Williams told the Grammys audience last month. The Times recently announced that “trying really hard and talking about it” was in, typified by Timothée Chalamet’s continued commitment to the “pursuit of greatness”, which he announced last year, along with being “so fucking locked in” to cinema. We’re all supposed to be paying for our big dreams in sweat again, it seems.
What’s wrong with that? Nothing, really – but an open admission that you’re ambitious, you want something specific and hard to attain from your life, and intend to work single-mindedly for it doesn’t come naturally to me and my gen X brethren (apart from Williams, apparently, aged 52). We internalised an idea of cool that involved the appearance of, if not actual, effortlessness that’s hard to shake.
But maybe, probably, we were wrong. Certainly, there was something disingenuous about our pretending not to care. Of course we had goals and ambitions and lots of people pedalled desperately to achieve them beneath the surface, while maintaining a nonchalant, “no revision” front above the waterline. Creating the illusion that success just happened did anyone who struggled or came up against a succession of closed doors a disservice (possibly some gen X strugglers were also somewhat obtuse – I was sad for years that I wasn’t a writer before eventually realising that successful writers wrote all the time rather than drifting around having vague ideas and not acting on them). This new notion of “showing your working” and being transparent about effort is refreshingly honest: the career equivalent of crediting your cosmetic surgeon, rather than claiming it’s all good genes and water.
