Our culture has an extremely narrow view of success, one that I hope to prove here not only makes no sense, but is actually one of our culture’s fundamental problems. Further, there are simple, rational measures of success which are sustainable.
Dictionaries, and, I would think, most people, define success (aside from the rather reflexive: “achieving one’s goals”) as attaining some combination of fame and wealth. Clearly, our society hungers for them. One could even model our society based on our definition of success alone; it informs everything we despise about capitalism—ruthless takeovers, money laundering, abuse of employees, customers, and the environment for higher profits—and politics—the lies, accusations, and scandals perpetuated in the hope of attaining more power and fame. People constantly buy things they have no need for. They will often work for years, enter gameshows, or just make up stories for the possibility of a moment of notoriety. This definition defines our lives and structures them around deep-set longings for riches and popularity.
Two social constructs. That we don’t actually want. That hurt us and our culture.
Fame:
Our near-universal quest for popularity is equaled only by our increasing understanding that it isn’t worthwhile. Celebrities of all types have horrible lives, besides or often because of their own prominence. They have drug problems, family problems, mental breakdowns, and many other issues, which are only inflamed by endless media coverage and discussion. The stars with apparently good lives (disregarding those whose secrets and scandals are discovered long after the fact) are often happy despite their fame; strong family ties or friendships from before their rise helped them through. As humans, we have developed incredible ability and affinity for personal relationships—not the unending love of thousands of strangers. Such huge followings often leave us strained, confused, depressed, or worse. Yet we continually idolize it, perpetuating these cycles—the rise and fall of stars. However, all of this being said, I don’t see fame as a problem, merely a symptom of creating such a large, connected society: legends inevitably emerge. Now, technology is only making the process faster.
Wealth:
Its meaning is entirely human; only within our equally imagined rules, laws, and societies does it even exist. It is our ability to prohibit others from using goods, our ability to make others work. While it used to be based on how pretty we thought gold was, now it’s based on how great people think the United States is. Wealth makes no physical sense. Desire for it is not intrinsic (as our stories often imply) to humans or advanced civilizations in general. When Europeans came to the Americas to trade and buy land, the natives didn’t understand what they were selling. They (as civilizations arguably more advanced than the Europeans) simply had no concept of owning the land. It is only through the eyes of our culture that we see wealth as we do.
However, even in our society wealth only garners a certain amount of safety, beyond which its use is much more difficult to define or justify. Why is the habit of unneeded hoarding goods or potential goods idolized by our culture? Past an income of around $75,000, reported happiness does not, on average, increase. Wealth doesn’t make you happier, live longer (if you live in a country with universal health insurance or have good insurance yourself—it’s probably still not completely true, yes, but it’s close enough), more intelligent, or give you a stable family life. Like fame and power, being rich can bring as many problems as benefits.
Finally, a society in which wealth is the ultimate goal is self-destructive. It inevitably causes people to disregard the environment, others’ pain, or even their own conscience, in order to gain wealth. This happens everywhere. Dictators take over countries because power and fame imply success. They sometimes wage wars until even the children have been killed and there is simply no one left to fight for them. They will continue to try to gain wealth and power (which leads to more wealth) until they are brought down or die. Closer to home, leaders manage businesses in the same reckless ways, without any concern for others or their own futures, with even more disastrous consequences. We have created a society that is able to take over continents in a handful of generations, leveling the landscapes and turning the land to work merely for their own profit, without concern for any other effects. The recent work of scientists, proving just how drastic and powerful these changes can be, has done essentially nothing to stem the tide of industrialization and waste.
Imagine if there were a group of squirrels which could only live in Higath trees. However, they spent all of their time not looking for food, mates, or sleeping in said trees, chewing the trunks down until they died. They spent all of their extra time and energy destroying their only habitat, because the most respected squirrels were the ones who had killed the most Higath trees.
There is a reason these squirrels don’t exist. If they ever did, they killed themselves in as many generations as it took for the Higath trees to die or the squirrels to rethink their strategy. I hope we can do the latter.
A definition of success based on wealth is nonsensical, unreasonable, and suicidal.
This may explain why our definitions of success are so frequently discarded by studies, idioms, movies, experts, books, religions, and our own experiences; why works as different as A Christmas Carol and the movie Hair emphasize that wealth is not as important as family and friends; why we call our own rush for success “the rat race” and excuse ourselves for “only being human;” why in a culture which worships wealth and fame, we feel perpetually sinful. To deal with the obvious negative consequences of our goals, and our lack of affinity for them if they are attained, we have created many different stories about original sin and the devil, explaining away the world’s problems. We have created religions in which “it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.” In a culture inundated with such illogical, misguided, and conflicting goals, we feel a perpetual guilt and lack of purpose or clarity. Success is sin. We don’t know where to turn.
My Definition:
What do I see as success? I look to the world around me, from my own instincts and experiences, to others’ thoughts, studies, and even religions. And these sources provide a remarkably consistent idea: success is equivalent to survival. As I touched on briefly in my Outline, if something doesn’t survive, it (by definition) dies, so survival is incredibly important. This is why the systems (ecosystems, animals, humans) we see existing today reward those processes which help it survive. This explains why humans love helping others and not hoarding goods, why people do good things like community service and holding doors for no reason: we love helping our community thrive. Safety, too, is therefore an important goal; it entails survival in the future, the sustainability of the organism, genetic code, or ecosystem. These concepts of success are reflected everywhere you look. Maslow’s hierarchy of needs defines our health and safety as humans’ top priorities, followed by more abstract, relationship concerns, which nevertheless build and strengthen individuals and communities for survival and resilience to change. We will do things for free that we wouldn’t do if we were paid. I will create a site trying to help save the world because I want to save it—I’m not in this for me.
Our system disregards these ideas, placing the greed of individuals over the survival of the system, leading to incredible inequality and environmental disasters that are not sustainable, leaving the majority of our population—those who actually work to support it—to suffer the consequences. Our system doesn’t seem to work out well in the long run.
On the other hand, a sustainable culture incentivizes those who help it. These are cultures based on support, on our own social instincts of giving, loving and helping, instead of hoarding and wielding power. In a culture where success is defined reflexively in this way (by how wise or helpful one is), those who benefit the culture, making it more sustainable or likely to survive, are respected and rewarded the most, by receiving support in return.
We have created the worst system we could have: one which destroys itself. Everywhere else we look in nature, and in our own (ancient) past, we only see those systems which support and strengthen themselves, because other systems do not survive. Only in those systems where success and survival are equivalent throughout the system (not just on an individual level) does the system remain healthy and resilient.
It is our misguided definition of success which creates the fundamental stresses and problems of our culture; it is unnatural, immoral, and unsustainable.
We don’t need to stop it; that will happen soon enough.
We need to change it before it does.
chris mcelroy 
Great thoughts – you’re going to love college!
Rather than responding via paragraphs, I am going to take out some of the lines and discuss them:
“People constantly buy things they have no need for.”
Isn’t need fairly subjective? I understand the overall point, people buy iPhones when they could get by without them, but couldn’t you make that argument for most facets of modern life? I do not need air conditioning, but life is made better by having it. All of these objects make my life easier and give me joy, so what does it matter?
“Celebrities of all types have horrible lives…” to “…which are only inflamed by endless media coverage and discussion.”
It seems that you are implying that becoming a celebrity causes “drug problems, family problems, etc.” and I do not think that is the case. People have these problems on their own. However, I do acknowledge the worsening effect being a celebrity can have on these issues.
“Its meaning is entirely human; only within our equally imagined rules, laws, and societies does it even exist. It is our ability to prohibit others from using goods, our ability to make others work.”
While animals certainly do not have any of the trappings of wealth, I do believe that animals carry out the first act you list above.
“Desire for it is not intrinsic (as our stories often imply) to humans or advanced civilizations in general.”
Going with your definition of wealth, as listed above, wealth is intrinsic to humans. Since the dawn of time, humans have fought over food and territory. Additionally, forcing people to work, while happening later in our evolution, was also helpful in advancing humanity.
“However, even in our society wealth only garners a certain amount of safety, beyond which its use is much more difficult to define or justify.”
Taking having an annual income of $75,000 as the amount needed for that “certain amount of safety,” use of money above that amount can be defined as luxury-based and justified by desire itself.
“…or give you a stable family life.”
However, lacking wealth can lead to an unstable family life.
“It inevitably causes people to disregard the environment, others’ pain, or even their own conscience, in order to gain wealth.”
Just for clarification, some people, or all people?
“…without any concern for others or their own futures…”
Well, I believe that businessmen/women wouldn’t want, in most cases barring Mitt Romney-like examples, their primary source of income and the criteria for which they are graded to be destroyed.
“Imagine if there were a group of squirrels which could only live in Higath trees. However, they spent all of their time not looking for food, mates, or sleeping in said trees, chewing the trunks down until they died. They spent all of their extra time and energy destroying their only habitat, because the most respected squirrels were the ones who had killed the most Higath trees. There is a reason these squirrels don’t exist. There is a reason these squirrels don’t exist. If they ever did, they killed themselves in as many generations as it took for the Higath trees to die or the squirrels to rethink their strategy. I hope we can do the latter.”
Humans pursue food, mates, and habitats in addition to wealth. Not to mention the squirrels would starve to death before being able to get rid of their trees.
“Everywhere else we look in nature, and in our own (ancient) past, we only see those systems which support and strengthen themselves, because other systems do not survive. Only in those systems where success and survival are equivalent throughout the system (not just on an individual level) does the system remain healthy and resilient.”
On one hand, you can look to the Native American cultures who, you could argue, embraced this system and, despite this, were wiped out. You can counter with extraordinary circumstances, but then again many civilizations in our history can, most likely, be pointed to as having this system and being wiped out nevertheless. On the other hand, you could argue that the Nazi Fascist System was, at least in theory, based on rewarding those who helped improve the country and that system was both horrid and self-destructive. Therefore, how is equating survival and success necessarily better? (On another note, other systems do not exist anymore do to the evolution of life itself.)
~Unneeded things “All of these objects make my life easier and give me joy, so what does it matter?”
Thus begins my response to pretty much all of your questions and society’s entire definition of success: it matters because we are currently destroying the environment.
I have thought about this while leveling entire forests in Minecraft: why do I not feel this is bad, while doing this in real life would be? Not because Minecraft doesn’t have “real” trees (OCA that their trees are just as real or even more so, as they are closer to the platonic idea or something… I don’t know). It is because the larger system is not affected by the number of trees. If we tore down the Amazon rainforest, which we currently ARE, then it would have HUGE consequences for the rest of the world. If I destroyed the same number of trees in Minecraft, the rest of the world wouldn’t be affected in the slightest. Anyways, these connections are why these actions matter. If you buy an iPhone, or drive over to KFC, two things that I have done, and probably you too, you seem to be doing nothing but adding money to the economy (good) and getting joy out of it (good).
However, this is FALSE. You are destroying the world with these simple actions, and our society is so contrived and built up that we don’t even realize it. With every chicken you buy at KFC, you are contributing to the huge industry which is currently destroying the Chesapeake Bay or whatever watershed they were raised in. These consequences are never seen, thought of, or paid for by the consumer. The organizations which do deal with these consequences, therefore making their customers pay for some of the damage their actions have on the larger world, the organization is punished by the “free market” for having exorbitant prices. Our lack of education on products and their consequences, and a government which doesn’t force the companies to solve them both lead to a world where progress implies destruction and changing this leads to your own destruction. So yes, your life might be slightly harder in some subjective ways, but choosing whether or not to buy these products DOES MATTER. It is telling of our society that you or anyone else would even ask this. Again, even knowing all this, I do the same things, so I am not on some better moral high ground here.
~Celebrities’ problems
I haven’t spent as much time as even the average person in the US following celebrities, so I find myself unqualified to correct you. However, I would agree that their sudden fame and access to means definitely contributes to their problems.
~Animals prohibit others from using resources
Yes. You’re right. This one made me think for a while. Here are some of my thoughts in response, not very well organized:
While some animals do hoard things for themselves (think: squirrels), more advanced/tribal mammals tend to reverse this trend. Packs of wolves or other groups of animals will share food, shelter, and warmth. This provides them a strength that they do not have on their own. While one can go out on their own–this is not bad in and of itself (I am not trying to set up an arbitrary rule that hoarding, stealing, or anything else is bad in and of itself, merely because of its usual consequences)– their chances of survival or being welcomed back into the pack if they left with, say, a whole deer, plummet. Also, all life certainly prohibits other things’ having access to resources. If I have a carbon atom in one of my cells, other things can’t have said carbon atom unless I excrete or exhale it, or they steal it from me (kill/eat the cell). So having control of resources, is, yes, not intrinsically bad, and is seen throughout the animal kingdom. However, this is not the same idea of wealth for the sake of wealth. If a wolf eats a deer, it is not so that he can revel in the fact that he now owns the deer’s cells, it is so that he can survive. If a bonobo makes a tool and keeps it for herself, it is not so that she can amass an impressive pile of tools to make other bonobos jealous, it is probably to solve a problem. The cause behind these actions is different, even though they may seem similar. In this vein, I have no problem with humans’ owning and developing technology, merely their trying to keep resources unnecessarily away from others while not using them themselves. The idea of wealth for the sake of wealth is my problem.
~”Since the dawn of time, humans have fought over food and territory”
While clearly hyperbole, I have to agree. And gorillas did it before them, and wolves and bears before them. However, again, they did it for different reasons.
As I pointed out in the post, native americans had basically no concept of owning or selling land. They were not fighting over the land so that they could own more land (which was why the English wanted land,
By your standards, failure is inevitable.
Whether on an individual or larger scale, everything will fall. Everything must end. Using your definition of success as survival, then, ultimately, success is impossible. However, I look at success in a different way. I see success as satisfaction. All that we yearn for, love, wealth, fame, power, happiness, these all contribute to our satisfaction with our own life. In this way, the description as “reaching one’s goals”, may be closer to actuality. Success itself is not objective, something that applies to everyone as a single absolute. Success is a variable, whatever you feel is satisfying, enough for your own life. If your own view of success is death, then suicide satisfies this view. In this way, success can be defined as anything and everything that pleases you, and it is this reason that success itself is so flawed. Seeing it this way, it is irrelevant to argue over the definition of success, but what view of this subjective idea is most beneficial to the individual and his society. Many views of individual success hurt society. Fame, wealth, power, these may be success to an individual, but do little to improve his community. However, your view of success does not hurt society. Survival, continuing to help our society, is something few people put before their own wealth or fame, because many see their success as growing in these “individual-oriented” areas. You also say that if something does not survive, it dies, but in many ways, people strive for fame to survive after the death, in the memories of people. The Egyptians may not be in the Afterlife, but who can say that they are not alive and remembered in our culture? Here, your view of success as survival allows for the hoarding of fame and power, because through fame, you can be remembered, and survive in memory. A better view of success might be to survive and encourage the survival of everything around you. This allows for societal success, as well as satisfying your own survival. While it is destined to fail, you will die eventually, this allows for a better, and more benevolent society. In the end, we shouldn’t, can’t, change the basic definition of success, this is subjective, and many may treat it differently. In order to fix this flaw, humanity must change its own subjective views, and must see our world, and its success, in a new light.
-1n3v1+ab|3
P.S. Speaking of communities, there are getting to be a lot of intelligent people on your site! Congratulations, and I hope this site continues to be successful.
I have considered this view fairly strongly, and will address it more in a later post. I think this is how a fair amount of people answer the question: “What is the meaning of life?” If I understand you correctly, you would answer something like “Being happy/satisfied.” While this view works remarkably well for its simplicity, it creates some interesting dilemmas and does not offer clear paths forward in many situations (e.g. regarding death and others’ happiness compared to yours). Epicurus tried to define a philosophy based around this in the past; defining the greatest happiness as inner peace and a modest life. However, these definitions do not seem to necessarily follow from such a definition of the meaning of life (instead, they seem to be forced upon happiness arbitrarily in order to fit into a more instinctive vision of success as one that is non-destructive). Imagine if someone took happiness to mean immediate pleasure, and spent the rest of their life finding the best drugs they could in increasingly large amounts, taking so many that they avoided nearly all depressions in happiness, until they died, probably only a few days (if not hours) later. I see no obvious contradictions between these actions and the philosophy that supports it (unless said person is religious and the actions have been deemed, again seemingly arbitrarily, sinful). Theoretically, it is harming no one and bringing quite possibly the greatest happiness anyone could ever experience.
However, to me, this clearly seems wrong. This is not the best way people could spend their lives. Epicurus realized this, and set up a different definition of happiness to support it. However, I think this is merely avoiding the larger problem. Happiness is not the goal.
A world of happy, unmotivated, satisfied people would be a desert of imagination and creativity. Now, you argue, that people are only happy and satisfied if they are creating and helping others (and I would largely agree). But this doesn’t mean that we should create and help others because it makes us feel good; it means that only those who enjoyed creating and helping others survived.
Also, I agree that many individual views of success hurt society. This makes them harmful. Sometimes, goals can even hurt individuals. I came across this passage today in Daniel Pink’s book Drive:
“Some of the U of R students had what Deci, Ryan and Niemiec label “extrinsic aspirations”–for instance, to become wealthy or to achieve fame–what we might call “profit goals.” After these students had been out in the real world for between one and two years, the researchers tracked them down to see how they were fairing. The people who’d had purpose goals and felt they were attaining them reported higher levels of satisfaction and subjective well-being than they were in college, and quite low levels of anxiety and depression. Thats probably no surprise. They’d set a personally meaningful goal and felt they were reaching it. In that situation, most of us would likely feel pretty good, too. But the results for people with profit goals were more complicated. Those who said they were attaining their goals–accumulating wealth, winning acclaim–reported levels of satisfaction, self-esteem, and positive affect no higher than when they were students. In other words, they’d reached their goals, but it didn’t make them any happier. What’s more, graduates with profit goals showed increases in anxiety, depression, and other negative indicators–again even though they were attaining their goals.” (141-2)
So, clearly, goals that are fairly common in our society can be immediately harmful even to the individuals achieving them. Therefore achieving your goals can be, in my opinion, a horrible definition of success–goals can be bad.
Next, you mention living on in fame. As an atheist, I do see this as our afterlife–the sum total of memories and effects you leave on the world defines your life. I think however, that basing success on this effect is misguided in a few small ways. For one, not everyone can be remembered on a large scale–people’s memories just can’t handle that many names or events. Secondly, many people are remembered, but for horrible things. Even if they aren’t horrible, many presidents are remembered for being controversial or making both good and bad decisions. Their fame is mostly guaranteed by their office; notably better or worse actions merely imply slightly more fame. Similarly, most people’s everyday actions won’t have large effects on their overall impression to the world, so it again does not provide a clear path to follow in many situations. Also, if I do agree with trying to be remembered well as a goal, it is only because it implies that there will be a society around to remember you, so it is a hidden way of establishi
I just realized that I forgot to mention a response to your first idea: “by your standards, failure is inevitable.”
I am not too sure about this. Yes, there are very few documented cases of people surviving past 115 or so. However, life has survived on earth for billions of years, through unimaginable disasters. Human civilizations have stood for thousands of years.
I am not so sure that survival for essentially arbitrarily long amounts of time is impossible–if we can create a civilization that survives for more like 10,000 years, a second even in an evolutionary (not cosmological) scale, by making it much more sustainable than our current one, which by pretty kind standards will start having very serious problems in just a few centuries. Oil, fresh water, land, and other resources are becoming (unnecessarily) very serious problems. Because we have failed to account for them as a society, we now face the consequences.
Anyways, if we did create something even a tad bit sustainable, humans or a similar species could do some pretty insane things.
We could pretty quickly settle a lot of the solar system, and with those resources (that aren’t being used by anything else so there’s no reason to worry about consuming them) we could settle a lot of the galaxy in still very tiny amounts of relative time.
We are currently only about a century away from modeling the human brain in a computer. Fully. With these levels of power and resources, scientists have basically no idea what we could do. At the very least, we could survive for a pretty damn long time.
*Even as individuals, if you can model their consciousness or copy it over to other humans. There are already a few ideas on how to do this, which will obviously be refined as this becomes more realistic. Basically, we could even send brains across the galaxy in laser form and other fun things.
I think you are trying to group singular success with the success of a group. If everyone puts their success, like satisfaction, ahead of group success, we would have a world filled with ignorant greed, but not necessarily without creativity, depending on what satisfies the needs of individuals. Separating these two different ideals is necessary if individual success is separate from the community success. While the failure of individuals is inevitable, at least with our technology, societies, as you point out, can survive for much longer. I know I didn’t cover everything you replied, but that’s because most of it is annoyingly correct. Thank you, and I hope you keep up this level of dedication in the future.
Sorry, I just found your comment. That is a great way of summarizing my point; group versus individual success. It goes nicely with what I’ll talk about later on the site, the idea of tribal societies (which is the sort of idea I was trying to lay the groundwork for here). In a tribe (or a gang or a team or anything) the success of the whole is valued more than the individual, and this I think is exactly why they are so gratifying. The idea of working “for the greater good” or for a purpose or for the team resounds even in our very individualistic society; we instinctively love these social goals and meanings. It gives our lives a purpose in the context of something much larger than ourselves.
If you look inside our own media, as you reference, A Christmas Carol, and Hair, they do not achieve, they do not succeed through their own survival. In many of these films, and as I believe applies to real life, happiness is portrayed as the root of success. Friends, family, things that make us happy, are both more important than, and should be more correlated with, success and achievement. Happiness, portrayed through media and the joy we strive for in our own lives, can be seen as the true meaning of success.
See my response to 1n3v1+ab|3; it addresses these ideas fairly well.