How do you equate success in life?

[Anordinarymum]

Reading and contributing to the thread on prostitution last night in the main and today got me thinking about success in life and how people perceive it.

It seems to me that people directly link success with wealth but...... when I read some of the horror stories about lousy bastard husbands I wonder, given that some of them seem to be affluent as well as nasty.

Surely success is more about enjoying life and feeling comfortable in your own skin?

@UntilYourNextHairBrainedScheme
Also if money or an established business is handed to you, already earned/ set up by someone else you aren't successful; that's someone else's effort not yours
Isn't the situation usually more nuanced than this though? In my experience it's normally the case that someone is given a (sometimes) quite considerable advantage as a result of their family/background that they then utilise to access excellent careers or build successful businesses. The individual has normally worked hard and made some sacrifices so feels like they "deserve" their success, without necessarily realising the extent to which the original advantage afforded them the opportunities that they were able to capitalise on.

Being happy and living life to the full.

I am not well off at all but I genuinely enjoy life and all it has to offer. I like my job, I have wonderful family and friends, I don't envy others or wish my life was different so I see myself as successful.

At the risk of sounding like a twat, my personal income has increased rapidly from 36-56k over the course of a few years, and here are my general observations:

• being too rich can deskill you. I have friends who get things cheaper than me because they can't afford not to budget, but they also undertake lots of projects - the sort of things that give great personal satisfaction in achieving and are innately more satisfying than mindlessly consuming/purchasing. My husband and I are much more likely to 'get someone in' for a problem.

• you lose touch with minor economies of your life. I'm not sure how much we pay for all sorts of utilities. If I see something I like for under a hundred pounds then checking my bank balance is wholly unnecessary. I can fit bigger purchases into my monthly budget without much thought. This is a positive and a negative, as I don't like losing touch with my (legendary) budgeting skills that got me where I am.

• attaining a high level of income can be unnerving. This is a biggie. The income itself is fine - but the notion of LOSING it is much scarier than when I earned less. I would find it much easier to flit to another job when I was on £36k. I got my mortgage comfortably on £36k. Life was rosy. Now I have all sorts of comforts, and most importantly, a big fat pension and savings accruing.

On the plus side:

• events that would cause stress and discomfort, and mistakes with a financial cost? Well, what about them? I can chuck money at the problem and it just goes away.

• I can pay for services that make my life easier. Now we're on a high income, I would consider a cleaner (decently paid) to be far more essential, and would recommend one even for much lower income households. The difference it makes to my life is staggering.

If I had a respectable pension and accommodation secured I'd happily work part time for a modest lifestyle income.

@DDIJ I think that really depends on your family. I'm NC with my toxic father so how he speaks about me to his family and friends has absolutely no bearing on my life.

For me it is a happy marriage.
Doing some good in life.
Having children.

thecatsthecats you aren't talking about success though, just about salary. Salary on its own doesn't even I say much about financial success (which is only one element of a successful life). Earning 56k at age 24 living in West Wales or South Yorkshire and yes, you're doing incredibly well financially - earning 56k living in London at age 45, (especially if you were male, working full time and not a recent career changer), and you aren't really.

DDIJ families are complex and biased - that's a pretty dreadful indication of success! Most families completely misrepresent or indeed misunderstand the happiness, career, relationship quality and finances of other adult family members who doesn't live with them. There are usually boat loads of either wishful thinking or projection involved, both on the positive and negative sides depending on history and favouritism and agenda ("your cousin is so happy and prosperous as a teacher/ doctor/ solicitor/ running her dad's business/ married to that lovely man she met at church/ online dating - why don't you do the same so I can boast about your success and ignore anything uncomfortable" or equally "don't get married straight out of university/ don't go to university/ don't move away/ don't stay in this dump of a town/ don't have a baby too soon/ don't leave having a baby too late - your cousin did and she's miserable and poor".)
There's also of course "poor Dave needs handouts because he's struggling poor dear after his awful wife left and took him for all he had" (Dave had an affair and earns comfortably but has his mum wrapped around his little finger and still handing him cash every time he visits and paying his car insurance), and "Sally's fine, doing well, we don't have to worry about her" meaning that Sally has been in the Coper role since she was 12 and we wouldn't notice her struggling if she plastered her final demand electricity bill to our TV and tried to explain that she's at the end of her tether over her wayward son and unhappy daughter all through Christmas dinner".

Sorry there were paragraphs before!

@UntilYourNextHairBrainedScheme

thecatsthecats you aren't talking about success though, just about salary. Salary on its own doesn't even I say much about financial success (which is only one element of a successful life). Earning 56k at age 24 living in West Wales or South Yorkshire and yes, you're doing incredibly well financially - earning 56k living in London at age 45, (especially if you were male, working full time and not a recent career changer), and you aren't really.

Ok, forget the numbers... my points related more to how a significant uptick in income has positives and negatives. It's a bit world's-smallest-violin category, but I DO 'worry' more about money now I have more of it.

Success is being happy and contented, so that's a strike 1 for money as a measure of success.

But to expand on a couple of my points - what makes me happy is the satisfaction of creating things and completing tasks. Sometimes this is fulfilled by work, sometimes by hobbies, sometimes by caring for and maintaining my home.

I look at some of the building projects friends far less well off than me have undertaken and am so jealous that they had the time to do something so satisfying.

But the high salary comes with stresses and obligations that often leave with little time or energy for doing tasks like that myself.

So in short, I agree - financial success is not a great indicator of success, and is actually something that generally separates people from activities that are known to be beneficial to happiness.

It's an interesting point from thecatsthecats. Am earning 6 figures in my mid 30s and yes, I do now work a little longer (around 7am-7pm) and find it harder not to be thinking about work all day every day - not least because I love my job and want to be amazing at it.

But my goodness, life is easier when you can just throw money at something to sort it out. I started my career on £16k and now earn nearly 10 times more (have lived in London all that time). I didn't particularly notice feeling cash strapped (I lived with 7 other people!) at the beginning. At £35-£50k and a bit older, I was doing a 9-5 and had more time on my hands - but the bills and saving for a London deposit were slightly stressful... from about £60k and up I have been happy with the trade off (less time, more money to save/feel financially secure/solve problems/enjoy myself).