American culture tells a particular story about success. Work hard. Sacrifice everything. Prove you deserve love by earning it. And if you’re not willing to make that trade—presence for provision, relationships for achievement—you don’t deserve to win. But if you don’t win, you don’t deserve respect.
It’s a no-win scenario.
Hollywood keeps telling this story because it keeps selling. Because it touches a wound we all carry.
I’ve teared up unexpectedly in more of these films than I can count. Each time it catches me off guard—I’ll be watching something I thought was just entertainment, and suddenly my chest tightens and I’m back in my own story.
The Family Man moves me to tears every time. Nicolas Cage glimpses the life he traded away for Wall Street success—the wife, the children, the ordinary mornings he’ll never have—and the film frames it as a choice he made. As if anyone really chooses.
Kramer vs. Kramer spoke to my father’s generation. A father has to lose his wife, his routine, his sense of himself before he can learn to actually parent. The message: men don’t know how to love their children until catastrophe forces them to.
The Pursuit of Happyness wrecked me. Chris Gardner’s devotion to his son is measured by his willingness to sleep in bathroom stalls, to endure homelessness, to never once admit defeat. Love as suffering. Presence as a reward you earn through pain.
Even Click—an Adam Sandler comedy—left me teared up in a theater, watching a man fast-forward through his children’s lives for career advancement, then beg for a chance to go back. A comedy. And I couldn’t stop crying.
The setup varies. The message never does. And every time, these films find the wound I thought I’d healed and tear it open again.
Noah Baumbach’s Jay Kelly—now streaming on Netflix—is the latest entry in this genre. George Clooney plays a famous actor who did everything right according to the American success script. He took the role that made him famous. He chose career over relationships. He kept grinding. He surrounded himself with people dedicated to his success.
And he won. He’s wealthy. He’s recognized everywhere. He gets tribute ceremonies in Tuscany.
But his daughters won’t return his calls. His father leaves before the tribute. His manager quits. And he finally realizes that everyone around him—his assistant, his publicist, his entourage—they’re not his friends. They’re employees. Paid loyalty, not love.
This is what winning looks like in American competitive culture. It doesn’t just create losers. It destroys the winners too.
The Movie That Made Me Flee
I watched The Family Man in 2000, right before I left California for Norway. At the time, I didn’t consciously connect the two decisions. Looking back, the connection is obvious.
That film surfaced something I already knew but couldn’t name: the impossible choice American culture forces on fathers. Prove your love by working yourself to death. Sacrifice presence to demonstrate you’re serious about providing. Measure your worth not by whether your children know you, but by how much you’re willing to give up so they won’t have to.
I was already becoming that father myself. The anxiety was overwhelming.
So I fled. I left for Norway shortly after that one, and I’m grateful every day that I did.
What Norway Taught Me
I didn’t find paradise. I found something extremely useful: proof that the American bargain isn’t inevitable.
In Norway, parents aren’t praised for sacrificing their relationships with their children to provide material security. They’re expected to be present. Workers aren’t celebrated for grinding themselves into dust. They’re protected by policies that assume rest is necessary and boundaries are healthy. Children aren’t taught that only winners matter. They learn that relationships matter. That presence matters. That being human is enough. As they told me so often, “We work to live, not live to work”.
American competitive culture—the belief that you prove your worth by sacrificing everything, that love must be earned through achievement, that there is no second place—is a choice. Not fate. Not human nature. A cultural invention.
And a cruel one.
“Can We Go Again?”
At the end of Jay Kelly, Clooney’s character stands in front of cameras at his tribute ceremony and asks quietly, almost under his breath: “Can I go again?”
It’s a question that echoes far beyond the film. Can I have another chance with my children? Can I undo the choices that led here? Can I restart my life with different priorities?
For Jay, sitting there in his sixties, the answer is no. You don’t get to go again. You get the life you built through the choices you made.
I was luckier. At thirty, I felt the same desperate question rising in my chest. But I still had time. I escaped.
And even then—even after fleeing to Norway, even after finding a culture that didn’t demand the same impossible trade—it took me ten years to undo the patterns. Ten years to stop measuring my worth by my productivity. Ten years to believe that presence could be enough. Ten years to stop performing love and start building it.
The competitive script runs deep. It doesn’t release you just because you change your address. But at least I had those ten years. At least I got to go again.
Most people don’t.
The Story We Should Be Telling
I’ll probably be moved by the next version of this story too. As long as American culture measures human value by achievement rather than relationships, these films will keep resonating. They touch something real—the anxiety we all carry about whether we’re sacrificing enough, achieving enough, proving enough to deserve love and security.
But what I want—what we all deserve—is a different story altogether.
Not the one where you win everything and lose everyone. Not the one where parents must choose between success and presence and we call it inevitable. But the one where human worth isn’t measured by achievement. Where success doesn’t require confusing paid loyalty with love. Where “Can I go again?” isn’t a heartbreaking realization at the end of your life—it’s an option you had all along, because the culture never demanded you sacrifice your relationships in the first place.
That’s not the story American culture tells.
But it’s the culture we should be building.
Robert is the author of Twenty-Five Hours: How to Create a Time-Rich Future in the Age of AI and founder of Better Places, exploring how we can build societies that serve human flourishing rather than extracting from it. He fled American competitive culture for Norway in 2001 and has never regretted it.
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