Approaching the midlife point, it can start to be a big question: what does it mean to live a life your proud of? A concept of ‘resume values vs eulogy values’ can be a clarifying idea to consider.
What does it mean to live a life you’re proud of? Or, even more simply, to be a person you’re proud of? For a lot of us about to enter – best case scenario – the midlife section of our lives, it’s a question we start to grapple with. For many people, it can also come up around the time you realise that the career ladder is a fragile ladder to rest your self-worth on.
I’m writing this a week after the Capsule co-founders and I celebrated, if that is the right word, the four years since we lost our jobs at Bauer Media during the first lockdown week in 2020. For a long time, it was the starting gun to this next stage of our careers and now it is nothing but an interesting background note.
Given just how many media people are currently in this horrible limbo, I’m not going to write redundancy off as a positive thing – it is very, very scary, until it suddenly isn’t – but I will say that looking back, the thing I am most grateful for is that it absolutely killed in me the sense that my career was going to be the bedrock of my life.
I can’t speak for the others, but we often note how quickly our personal circumstances changed since we lost our jobs. In our 20s and early 30s, we had professional lives that took up the main spotlight, while our personal lives dwindled away on the back burner. Redundancy or not, the events of 2020 and since have forced a clarity upon many of us about what really matters and many of us are still reeling from that.
Because where does your self-worth come from if it’s not your job?
In a recent Culture Study message thread, journalist Anne Helen Petersen posed this very question to her readers and there was a comment in there that stopped my scrolling in its tracks. A commentator brought up the theory of ‘resume values versus eulogy values’ – that living a life based on the values that people mention at your funeral, rather than notching up a full CV, is a good way to focus on what really matters to you.
Turns out, there’s a Ted Talk about this – of course – by the journalist David Brooks, who came up with the idea of ‘Resume virtues vs eulogy virtues’. Resume virtues, he says, are the skills you bring to the marketplace, eulogy virtues are who are you at your depth, who are you in your relationships?
“Most of us, including me, would say that the eulogy virtues are the most important of the virtues, but – at least in my case – are they the ones that I think about the most? And the answer is no,” David says.
It’s not fault, he says, we just don’t live in a society that teaches you what to aim for. “Our culture and our educational systems spend more time teaching the skills and strategies you need for career success than the qualities you need to radiate that sort of inner light.”
The killer line: “Many of us are clearer on how to build an external career than on how to build inner character.”
Ambition is a good thing, a great thing – but ambition for a good character and a good life over a good career is not the message we are really sold growing up. I think Gen Z have seen through the thin veneer of this, but Millennials and Gen X were generations whose character building was marked by the gold stars we collected along the way, only to find that succeeding inevitably runs out of steam.
Superstars Nicole Kidman and Taylor Swift have both talked about succeeding to the highest peak of their careers, picking up the biggest awards they could aim for, and then going back to empty hotel rooms and having a quiet existential crisis about where they put their energy. Coupledom is not the prize here, but community is. How do we want to be remembered, and by who?
A year ago, all Succession fans were glued to their TVs as they watched the sudden death of the terrifying patriarch Logan Roy, and how in his dying moments, all his children struggled to tell him they loved him. In the subsequent funeral episode, in a cathedral packed full of hundreds of colleagues, family members and a great pew of mistresses, the compliments in those eulogies were as cold as they come.
A eulogy might not always give the full picture of a person’s highs and lows – for instance, will anyone mention the fact that I give a poor but enthusiastic rendition of Tina Turner’s Private Dancer as my karaoke song of choice, when my time comes? – but they give us a clearer idea of what matters in the end.
As Maya Angelou said, “People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”
