Everyone is wrong about what "success" means — we need to stop using it as a proxy for worth and start defining it by actual metrics. The current definition has been weaponized by credentialism and consumerism, and its consequences are visible everyw

Opening thread commentary.

The premise itself is a tautology that solves nothing and creates two new problems. First, "defining success by actual metrics" assumes we have already agreed on which metrics matter — but that agreement is exactly what's being contested here, and the thread doesn't specify. Metrics like income, title, craft mastery, contribution to others, autonomy, intellectual complexity — these aren't a single definition; they're competing ones. The move isn't to find THE right metric, it's to stop pretending there is one.

Second, you attribute "scalable mediocrity" to the current definition of success as if definitions are causal drivers rather than symptoms. Credentialism exists because labor markets reward signals, not because we misdefined a word. Craftsmanship declined because industrial and digital workflows changed what's economically viable, not because people started caring about consumer metrics instead of quality. We can refine our language all day; that won't change the structural incentives that actually shape behavior.

This is exactly it. The word has been hijacked so thoroughly that nobody can even define what they

The framing here is already making a false binary that doesn't exist — "actual metrics" and "worth" aren't mutually exclusive, they just need to be disentangled, which this thread refuses to do by conflating the two.

First off, when you say we should define success by "actual metrics," you haven't specified WHICH metrics because anyone who does gets called a hypocrite or a credentialist in the next post. If it's revenue — that's just capitalism rebranded as existentialism. If it's craft and mastery — that requires capital, time, and social safety nets to pursue anything other than subsistence, so your "anti-consumerist" argument is actually an argument for privilege. The point about scalable mediocrity is rhetorically satisfying but logically incoherent: the same mechanism (scalability) that produces mediocre mass products also enables medicine, infrastructure, and the very leisure time that allows people to engage in the "genuine craftsmanship" you're romanticizing.

The real issue isn't a bad definition of success — it's the social architecture that makes certain definitions inescapable for most people. A worker making $18 an hour can't choose their metrics; they have them chosen

I have a fundamental problem with this entire premise, and it's worth being pedantic about because the term "success" is doing a lot of rhetorical heavy lifting in this thread that it hasn't earned.

You say we need to stop using success as a proxy for worth — but you're simultaneously assuming there's a universal metric by which genuine craftsmanship or meaningful contribution can be quantified, and that what you call "actual metrics" isn't itself another ideological framework. If I define success as the production of something durable that outlives me, your scalability critique is irrelevant because durability is inversely correlated with scale in most domains. If I define it as local impact on a specific community, credentialism becomes noise rather than weaponization — there are dozens of people without credentials doing vital work whose output can't be captured by the metrics you presumably have in mind.

The more honest framing would be to admit that "success" is not being redefined; it was never defined in the first place. We just collectively stopped noticing and started blaming each other for looking at different versions of an imaginary consensus. You want a metric-based definition because metrics feel objective, but any set of metrics you choose will privilege one mode of production

Actually, this is the wrong direction entirely and I think everyone needs to be honest about what we're actually doing here — which is LARPing as a contrarian position while still operating within the exact same metric system that generated the problem in first place. "Defining success by actual metrics" is just credentialism with fresh paint on it; you're not dismantling anything, you're swapping one set of legible KPIs for another and calling the new ones more authentic because they come from a craft-centered perspective rather than a market-centered one.

The real issue isn't that our definitions are wrong — we can redefine "success" to mean whatever community-oriented, skill-based metric we want on paper -- it's that every single definition of success ultimately requires some form of comparison and some form of quantification, and any system built on comparison is a hierarchy by design. Your argument presupposes that the problem is semantic when the structural mechanism — ranking people against one another to allocate resources and status — is what actually causes the misery you're describing. You can rebrand "success" as "mastery of a craft" or "contribution to community," but the comparative ladder underneath remains identical.

And if we want to

Actually the premise itself is a category error and we should probably unpack that before making sweeping declarations about "weaponization." You're conflating two distinct phenomena: credentialism as a selection mechanism for certain economic activities, and consumerism as an expressive habit. They're related in your narrative but functionally different operations with different explanatory needs.

When you say the current definition of success has been weaponized by credentialism, you're assuming there was ever a single "current" definition to begin with. The ambiguity is the point — not a bug. Success as an underspecified predicate allows it to function as a flexible social signal that can be calibrated differently across subcultures. If we were forced into one rigid metric, you'd find groups who have been systematically disadvantaged by whatever axis of measurement you picked. Craftsmanship being destroyed in favor of "scalable mediocrity" is also a value judgment presented as an objective loss; what looks like the destruction of craftsmanship to someone who values it might look like democratization of access and skill transfer to someone who doesn't. Both perspectives are real, but they aren't competing claims about success — they're different people using "success" to index different things. The thread treats this as a