We often wonder what success means and why should we pursue it.
I remember years ago when I was still in college, a friend of mine one day told me : “Listen, bud, there are two kinds of people in this world: Successful and unsuccessful, which one do you want to be?”.
I was surprised at the maturity of this question. At an age of around 20, usually nobody is interested in analyzing concepts like this. I wasn’t too sure on what the answer was either and my impression waas that nobody is unsuccessful, everybody strives to achieve their targets but quite often there are forces beyond our control that may block us from reaching them.
I still do not think this should be worrying us. If it does we will reach a point we will be concerned more about failures than success.
Hopes and fears
While one may think that success has been achieved, everything can still change any given time. Achieving your goals and setting new ones means you are successful, but there can be situations that you never accounted for.
One day you are successful the next day you are called a degenerate. This is life, we are taking our chances depending on the variables we understand, however, there are so many we never understood that the strive for success becomes unimportant and pointless.
For some success may mean reaching achievements and targets, but for others, success means hoping for nothing at all to achieve freedom.
I hope for nothing - I fear nothing. I am free.
- Nikos Kazantzakis
What is success for our civilization?
Source: Unsplash
What we are looking for is what society tells us, and our biological needs demand in order to propagate the species. The biological success is to raise children, but it doesn’t mean you were unsuccessful if you didn’t make a family, anything could have been a reason that didn’t allow that.
Sadly though it seems that our societies are moving towards what the movie “Idiocracy” predicted as a possible future.
This film can be considered a warning to the human race, as it describes perfectly how the advanced society we have today can be corroded, dumbed down, and eventually doomed to extinction.
Is it “success” for our species to create a dystopian lower intelligence society ruled by thugs?
Conclusion - Can we measure success?
Image Source: Unsplash by Guille Álvarez
Success as a word is about setting a feasible target and achieving it. But when it comes to discriminating people and labeling them as successful or losers, then this is just another of those society narratives that doesn’t really mean anything.
Come to think of it, are we losers or unsuccessful when forces beyond our power are not allowing us to proceed further?
What do you do when you want something so much and the whole universe conspires against you and not helping to achieve it?
Failure is guaranteed then, isn’t it? Why then keep agonizing and not just enjoy what is already there without having to think of success or failure. Success is all in our mind in fact thinking about it means we are also thinking about failure and this is not going to help either.
We set targets, just to find some meaning in life, and if we achieve them we may feel good but we also will feel empty, and perhaps our achievement will not look so good when we have to compete with 8 billion people.
Failure doesn’t mean we were not good or did not try our best. This is just like that, it is not easy to become one of the top in the world at anything. The odds are not good and we can only lower our expectations and targets to a bare minimum.
Is every athlete in the world a failure if they never achieved a gold medal in the Olympics?
Success will be this, to achieve the small things in life that are meaningful to each one of us and unrelated from what society may dictate.
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I was happy to see JonicaBradley managed to create the Prompt Community. Congrats! Here is my submission to the latest prompt, and I will love to read from others too. Helps us out when we are experiencing writer's block!
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Your article is on point ! You enlightened me to see how success and failure works in our daily lives. Thank you, Pantera ! Keep on inspirating people !