I never fully bought into the consensus ideas of what constitutes a successful life. Money, power, 2.3 kids, a house in the burbs.
I was an only child and I spent a lot of time around adults as a kid, especially before my teens. Most of them were spending their lives doing things they wouldn’t have done if they didn’t need money, and most of them didn’t seem happy—in some cases happy about their work, in other cases happy about their lives.
I grew up, went to work because I had to eat and keep a roof over my head and heat on in Canadian winters, and I didn’t find much to recommend itself in most jobs. Half the time the work didn’t need to be done, the rest of the time it did need to be done, but we were stopped from doing it properly due to management wanting to increase profits, and often what they did would only increase profits in the short run and hurt them in the long run while alienating customers and employees.
I could have respected my job in life insurance if we’d actually been looking out for those we insured more. There were a few old school underwriters left who did, and I could see my employer had once been run honorably, but by the time I got there all that remained were a few guttering embers. A lot of people got rich under the new regime, but long term profitability went down. (Doing good isn’t always stupid even in terms of greed.)
But the bottom line really was “would I do this if I didn’t need the money?” The only jobs I ever had where that was somewhat true were being the managing editor at FireDogLake and the Agonist, and writing this blog, though even in those three cases I’d have done less if I didn’t need the money.
“I worked all my life and most of it I would never have done if I didn’t want or need more money” doesn’t seem like success to me. (I’m talking only for myself. If it does to you, great. There’s certainly honor in providing for one’s family even in a job one hates, for example.)
There’s a lot of chatter about falling fertility rates and lots of pro-family propaganda these days. I’m not anti-family or pro-family, both stances seem absurd to me. I’m pro-good families and anti-bad families and I’ve sure seen plenty of people have children who fucked their kids up beyond belief and none of them seemed happy in their family life. “I produced 2.3 fucked up kids and was miserable almost all the time” doesn’t smell like success to me. Again, talking only for myself. If it does for you, awesome.
Then there’s power. It seems, in the West, that almost everyone who has power does more evil than good. Corporate or political, this is true. I’m hard pressed to think that “I became President of the US and bombed five countries and killed a million people and made another 5 million homeless in an unnecessary war justified by lies” is success. Or it’s not any success I want and if it’s a success you want, you’re human filth.
Of course, the power is a Western issue (and Africa and a lot of other places, but especially the West in this time period). I have issues with Xi, but I think he can legitimately claim that he uses his power more for good, especially for the Chinese, than evil. FDR could have said something similar. But right now power in the West is poison. Even people like Bernie Sanders and AOC have voted to send Israel weapons while they commit genocide.
I do think that getting power and then doing more good with it than harm is admirable and a life worth living. So I guess there’s that.
But in the end we all share the same fate: death. All the money, all the power, all the wealth, even our families will be lost. I’ve been close to death more than once, a whisper away, and I live my life in the knowledge that everything I have here, in this life, I will one day lose. Perhaps my knowledge is an exception, perhaps I will be reunited with people I love at some point. Perhaps. But for sure the money and power and possessions are all lost.
I don’t have any real answers. I’ve tried, personally, to live a life where I spend as much of my time doing what I want to do as possible, and not what someone else wants me to do. I’ve tried, not always successfully, not to hurt people except to protect others from them and to be kind, because life is often shit and I don’t like it when others make life worse for me and do like it when people are kind to me. I’ve tried to speak the truth as best I can, hoping that the truth is something good. Obviously I’ve failed at times, truth being a slippery thing.
I don’t view myself as successful or as a failure (though I certainly thought of myself as a failure for years). Just as someone stumbling around, trying to live a life I like more than I hate and to not do more harm than good. If I die and can look back and think “yeah, I more or less enjoyed a lot of that and helped more people than I hurt” then I’ll consider my life a success no matter the scale or the stage.
But thank God I never bought fully into what society considers success. The idea of being Obama or Trump or Musk or Zuckerberg or most executives I’ve ever met is nauseating.
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