Content warning: This article discusses suicide.
I wouldn’t make a good sailor. Boy scout outings and biology labs have washed me out to sea a few times in my life, and after the excitement of finding myself on a boat subsides, I usually feel somewhat queasy. But on a trip last week with the Vantuna Research Group, I felt truly seasick. The rest of the crew was operating a remotely operated underwater vehicle (kind of like a drone for the ocean), videotaping fish in different parts of a reef made from a smattering of human-deposited detritus — mainly pier pilings, telephone poles and a few sunken barges. I was slumped at the back of the skiff 20 minutes in. My drooping eyelids felt heavier than lead sinkers. I should’ve been looking at the horizon, the best way to steady oneself when seasick. Instead, my spinning mind fished for anything but that to keep from vomiting.
I started thinking about the worst maritime experience of my life. I hated fishing growing up, and I still don’t have the patience or finesse for it, but my twin, John, has been a natural angler for as long as I can remember. He usually fishes in freshwater, but he once convinced our dad to wake up at 3:45 a.m. to take him saltwater fishing on a group charter off the coast of Monterey Bay. We must’ve been 9 or 10 at the time. I got dragged along somehow.
The fishing was bad that morning. Or so John tells me. I don’t remember casting a line even once, as my only memories from the trip are scenes from purgatory once I got sick. We all took Dramamine, an anti-nausea drug, but I tossed my cookies pretty soon after we left the harbor. I proceeded to estivate in the boat’s cabin, curled up in fetal position. Our dad texted John about the trip recently, and he replied “I remember you and Jimmy yakking over the side, and the smell of anchovies reeking throughout the boat. What a fun day.”
Fishermen, right?
I thought about this a while longer before realizing that thinking about throwing up only made me feel like throwing up more. I languished, incapacitated, vertigo intensifying. Then, a fleeting thought trawled me upwards.
My mind was snagged and lifted by thoughts of failure. This seems paradoxical, but I wasn’t netted by thinking about failure in isolation. As I grappled with fulfilling my purpose on the boat — to help with the research — flashbacks of these childhood memories and a recent tragedy in my hometown made me wish that I had been taught to deal with failure differently.
Growing up in Silicon Valley, my community taught students how to succeed creatively, but not how to fail and persevere creatively. Whether conscious of it or not, I, like so many others my age, tethered my definition of success to the aphorisms of tech visionaries responsible for the region’s economy. Apple and Meta’s offices aren’t far away (and neither is Stanford, another can of worms I can’t open and fish with today). Neither are the oracular dogmas of Steve Jobs: “Those people that are crazy enough to actually change the world are the ones that actually do it,” or Facebook’s first motto, coined by Mark Zuckerberg: “Move fast and break things.”
According to the tech titans, you have to change the world by breaking it and rebuilding it how you see fit to be successful. Sure, the people who change the world to fit their ideas deserve praise. But the ethos teaches students that if the world doesn’t bend to their whims sooner or later, they’ve failed themselves and their communities. At Palo Alto High School, known informally as ‘Paly,’ I was never taught what to do when inevitably failing to change the world in the ways Zuckerberg and Jobs describe.
A suicide in February at Gunn High School, a nearby public high school in Palo Alto, refreshed my concerns about Silicon Valley’s stigma around failure. Like the suicide clusters at Paly and Gunn in 2009-10 and 2014-15, the February suicide will inevitably pose questions about self-imposed, familial and communal pressures to succeed. In The Atlantic Magazine’s 2015 article “The Silicon Valley Suicides” by Hanna Rosin, Yale-educated psychologist Suniya Luther found two major sources of distress among high schoolers from well-off school districts: the “pressure to excel at multiple academic and extracurricular pursuits” and kids’ feelings of isolation from their parents. Rosin sums up Luther’s second source of distress by writing that “often the kids learned to hide their failures — real or imagined — for fear of disappointing their parents.” I’m one of those kids. I think most students at Oxy once were, or still are, as well.
Success doesn’t have to be measured in Steve Jobs’ terms. However defined, success shouldn’t be the aim of adolescence and education. To steal Apple’s maxim, we need to “think different” about failure, not success, and teach each other to creatively dissent from the relation that Jobs and others propose between the individual and the world.
On the boat, these thoughts and a moment of shut-eye brought back my lucidity. I wish my younger self remembered that success doesn’t have to mean catching a fish or being a research pro. It can mean gazing at the horizon, feeling less seasick wave after wave.
Contact Jimmy Miller at jmiller4@oxy.edu
