Why so many people want to be successful today? Why the notion of a meaningful life is forgotten by so many of us, and so quickly, when the spell of a successful life seduces us. Does success bring meaning and happiness and what is the true order to pursue them? Meaning first or success first? And what happens when we seek success, abandon meaning and offer our lives on the altar where self-sacrifice takes place, namely the effort required to pay the cost of success? Does life grow in us or death?
Suicides are 300% (even 500% in some studies) higher among famous and successful people than among ordinary people. We can come up with some clever terms and talk about the fact that people with a diagnosis in the bipolar area, meaning those prone to develop manic episodes, tend to become famous more often. During episodes of mania, they have no problem being exhibitionists and displaying an exaggerated self-confidence that comes from the illusion of omnipotence. Which also wins them the applause of the crowd. But these episodes of mania are followed by very severe depressive episodes, which would explain to some extent the massive suicides among actors and musicians. You may know the legend of suicides around the age of 27, which haunt famous figures. But things are not as simple as such a verdict suggests…
Success cannot precede meaning, says Dr Victor Frankl, a survivor of Nazi camps. It is meaning that must precede success, not the other way around. This is the only way to live a fulfilled life. Meaning, in his understanding, can appear in three forms, all of which are about transcending the self in terms of the present moment. We thereby speak first of the possibility of creating something (a work of art, a community, even a business that offers true prosperity), then secondly we speak of experiencing something greater than your particular self (nature, an interpersonal relationship) or, if the first two ways are unavailable to us, as they were to him while he was in Auschwitz, we are talking thirdly about choosing your attitude to what life imposes on you, beyond your personal choices, at the level of experiences that constrain you with their brutal force.
Why sense and why success? Are we not facing today a culture of success, where we are offered solutions everywhere, by all sorts of experts and influencers? And to be successful in the many areas of our lives we need to buy their innovative products. They are the saving solutions to our needs, and if we are in possession of them we will find the long sought after happiness, they tell us. The problem is, the needs keep coming! In a culture as developed as ours, where there are so many solutions to our basic needs (food, warmth, shelter), we are endlessly made aware by these merchants of happiness of new and new variations of our needs. We come to believe that we are needy, because we have lost our meaning as humans, we seek only to be successful in the eternal problem of life, we seek comfort…
Success is nothing other than efficiency in problem solving. And in the logic of success, we become successful, meaning valuable, when we succeed when we have solutions to different kinds of problems. Each of us seeks to be associated with a certain type of value, a certain type of success. We each capitalize on this value in the way we propose solutions to certain life problems. Problems that we manage to solve to some extent, based on who we are as individuals. So, some of us prefer to be associated with the value of money, some with the value of beauty, some with the value of the mind, some with practical, engineering efficiency, some prefer to be known as good and compassionate people, and that makes them feel needed by the community. Each pursues certain values and seeks to embody them in order to raise their self-esteem. Otherwise we go and live like Tarzan with the gorillas in the jungle, or like the monks, those who leave the world and strictly seek union with God. There is also a third variety, madness, but that too takes you out of society, because you become enough for yourself, your world no longer welcomes anyone different from you into it. So if we stay in the world, among people, we seek to represent a certain capital of value, so that we can enter into an exchange relationship with them. So to be together for each other, but also to need each other from the perspective of the effectiveness of our neighbour. Of their individual success in solving particular problems that we are not so good at. That is, to cooperate successfully.
In this way, you come to quantify your personal success by others’ admiration of your form of power, the one you choose to manifest in your social world. And your forms of power are: your wealth, your professional skills, your artwork, your genes. But we run into a big problem when your capital of value, the one you produce, or inherit, or whatever it is through which you affirm your identity, does not come from your inner nature. When you come to do this, you enter strictly into a relationship of trading with the world and deny yourself the freedom to manifest your essential nature, your true self, the one you received by being uniquely and unrepeatably created. This is because you are simply producing and offering what sells and not offering to the world, free from the pressure of its validation, who you authentically are. When you only aim for success and not meaning, you become merely a successor, one who mechanically re-produces something that was once labeled as valuable, which is what is already being bought. And the world is a slave market where you sell yourself the freedom you have when your meaning is born of being who you were created to be. That is, that personal and unique meaning by which God wants to make himself known to the world, that meaning that is about who He intended you to be in this world. The very word success is a word with commercial implications. It comes from the Latin succedere, which means to follow after something and refers to the favourable end of a transaction.
So no one denies the intelligence of these big businessmen, but no one can deny their lack of freedom. Their inability to turn the time offered to them into a time of generosity. Their life is a time of survival, one in which all they do is buy from the world the supplies necessary to remove death from their horizon. And while they may have a big bank account, they are the real poor when it comes to real life. That’s because they betray the real life in them, and trade it in for a momentary forgetfulness that accompanies the applause of the world. They forget that the world and the world’s people don’t love you, but they only keep you around as long as you give them the glow necessary for oblivion to become a consent. But what do we want to forget? We want to forget the tragedy of not being able to feel valued by who we are, but needing others to validate us. And that’s painful, to have to sacrifice your authenticity on the altar of the world’s values. They reject themselves in their real selves, and out of love for the applause of the world they create within themselves a hatred for the life within them, a life that cannot be shared. This sense of betrayal is unbearable, even crushing. So it is in vain that they gain the world if they lose their soul, the soul which, with every inspired and exhaled breath, brings joy or despair in relation to the truth of what is in us. From this deep sense of abandonment arises the desire to annihilate this false self that they have so effortlessly created in order to succeed in the world and with which they identify. The self that the world validates and applauds. But in the end, through the loneliness you experience inside, through the rejection of what is alive in you, the world’s applause turns into the rhythm of a funeral march.
There is no direct correlation between prosperity, despair and suicide. However, there is a strong correlation between meaning and the joy of being alive as opposed to success and the burden of living. To be successful is to perform, that is, to be successful in a particular role, one that has to do with a particular problem that needs solving. To be meaningful is to experience the joy of being alive through who you are, and this deep sense of rest is rooted in God’s primary intention for you, in your authentic nature. For when He created you, in the mystery of His will, He had in mind a unique and personal way in which this will of His could be expressed in the world. You are you, because you are a divine intention and your life is the expression of an eternal desire, you are not you because the world says congratulations, I like what I can buy from you.
Choose! Success or meaning?
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