Success has become the most sought-after concept in America.
I like to connect success to the word “concept” instead of “task” or “action” because of its fluctuating and subjective value. Success to you may be kickstarting your boho-beachfront coffee joint with your significant other and being able to support your financial needs at the same time. Success to me, however, could be completing a Star Wars Lego TIE Fighter model in under two hours with NO bathroom breaks, or managing to get to my one o’clock features and opinions class without stepping on any cracks in the cement. I have done it before.
To reiterate the point, there are infinite notions of what success is, and disorienting amounts of ways to achieve it.
The coronavirus has absolutely ruined the healthy way of achieving success because of society’s detrimental pressure to walk out of the pandemic greatly exceeding who you were before. Every opinion article I read about COVID-19 is either “great hobbies to pick up” or “how to start your own company/write a book during the pandemic.” Those are all fine topics, but I would like to argue the fact that most people are not at the right time in their lives to achieve those things.
There is a difference between fantasizing and realism.
Immanuel Kant, a German philosopher, and a prolific thinker during the Age of Enlightenment, argued that an individual’s progress is neither automatic nor continuous, and it is one’s gradual movement through life becoming enlightened on the way. If progress is deemed a natural movement through time, why do individuals feel so compelled to quicken the process during the pandemic?
Society has attributed betterment to more tangible things one achieves, rather than letting life guide you to enlightenment and self-improvement, ultimately leading to personal success. This notion begs the question: if I am not fulfilling another individual’s definition of success and strictly my own, is that really success? Have we come to the point where success is now just a lust for societal acceptance and passive-aggressive pats on the back to one another, rather than a true measurement of self-growth?
Gautama, later deemed “Buddha,” is said to have found true enlightenment by himself under an arbitrary Bodhi tree, then committed his life to share his epiphany with others. If his dharma was not seen publicly, would his split-second monumental discovery under the tree ever amount to anything?
After Jesus’ ascension, the apostles shared the Gospel in Jerusalem and then dispersed throughout Israel, but would their conversions be worth it if they individually contained their religious awakening?
I write articles and post my published work so people can give me the affirmation that I have worth, even though I believe the opposite. I work out at the gym so society will pine and gawk over a version of myself that I am not satisfied with, but if I did all of those things and knew that they would not be publicly seen, would those successes then be worth it?
Again, success is subjective, and some people still correlate personal success with individually influenced motives, but the notion that one must work to better themselves and quickly obtain personal nirvana during a span of merely a year is outright ridiculous.
According to a study done by the medical trade journal1 BMJ, suicide rates have exponentially increased up to 145% due to declination in mental health during the last year of the pandemic. No individual should feel pressure to become “the best version of themselves” because there is now suddenly more time to put to that task. If you haven’t painted the window shutters that you’ve been planning to paint for six months, that’s okay. If you haven’t shed the extra weight you’ve carried since 2017, that’s acceptable.
Let’s take the avoiding-cracks-across-campus scenario. Once I made it to the building, I deemed myself successful and shrugged it off.
Success is fleeting.
Once we achieve what we desire in the present moment in our lives, we move on with an insatiable hunger to succeed even more. There will always be something else to see or do, and there will always be someone else you desire to be.
Take life one step at a time. You have not achieved certain successes you surmise because you simply are not equipped enough yet. Time throughout life will bring success to you, not time newly allotted merely from the pandemic.
So, for right now, I rhythmically guide my way over the sidewalk’s cracks, not because I am restricting myself to a seemingly insignificant and inadequate success, but because if I want to work my way up to the bigger successes, sometimes it takes dancing over cracks to amount to something more.