The word ‘success’ carries some weight with it. The etymology behind it. I think of it as a colloquial term to denote meritocracy as a doctrine. It upholds capitalism and undermines democracy. It promotes inequality.
It needs to be redefined.
My way of defining success is by contrasting it with the word ‘progress’. But this word must be redefined, too. In order to understand success you must understand what progress is. If you can understand this you may get an insight into how my mind works.
So life compels you to exist, right? There’s no end goal. It’s completely superfluous to die, equally absurd to live.
Evolution tells you to live because you are free to do so. But that tells me that evolution is selfless. Progress isn’t an end goal, it’s infinite, unpredictable. We chase the dollar. We build and build. We learn, we expand. We master our universe, we transcend.
We don’t live for ourselves but for a greater purpose — to reproduce. To evolve. Like all living things.
You have your emotions and you enjoy them. You’ll read a book or listen to a song in order to feel them. You’ll talk to people to feel them. That’s the essence of your life. You contribute to progress and you feel stuff, that’s basically it in a nutshell.
So ‘progress’ means survival. If a species is to be successful it must be pro survival. Anything else is meaningless because survival will always be what we have to do, it will never be redundant.
Isn’t it weird? Because there is only the suspense of disbelief that compels us to think there is something more to all of this. That there’s a finality. The only finality is death, so we give life and it returns to us meaning. Now that is the ultimate success.
I guess all there is to do is to enjoy life and make the most of what you’ve got.