Our age suffers from a kind of obsession with success. Every now and then, lists of the most successful people, movies, athletes, countries... Loser has become a worse insult than nerd, and no price is too high for fifteen minutes of fame, not to mention influencer status... But what does it really mean to be successful? And why is it so important to people? Who decides about it and how?
The assessment of success can change with age, vary between cultures, and still it is often difficult for us not to criticize women who are successful in "men's jobs". Pride, school success may or may not predict success in the professional sphere and says nothing about athletic success. And I deliberately chose three domains where the results are expressed numerically and easily compared (as they are the most popular today), because ethics and aesthetics would bring us much more problems.
Success has originally to do with the capacity to solve problems. In practical, everyday situations, social conflicts, when we are hungry or exposed to danger - the one who knows how to quickly and efficiently solve a problem can be the most important resource that a group has and to whom they will turn in the future when they are in trouble. And then someone being a good engineer, driver or dentist can mean a lot and be highly valued, since not all of us have those knowledge and skills. Also, we value more people who solve bigger or more urgent problems (for example, surgeons), to whom we entrust the most precious things (pediatricians, teachers), when problems and solutions are completely foreign to our experience (astronauts), or those who know how to show us their work on a solution as very dramatic and televised (athletes, politicians).
Of course, it is obvious to all of us that success sets us apart from the group. In most societies, the more successful someone is, the more prominent and respected they will be, often even receiving a title or special function. The more successful you are, the more people are interested in your opinion, maybe they even write down what you say, beginners start to imitate you, people wait for you to fix their car... Even those who envy you can be kinder to you, so suddenly you don't wait in line anymore, you get a discount, compliments, championship. From this moment, complications begin, since due to the subjective experience of enjoying success, we can begin to strive for it and not for other goals, and to fight for it by all means.
In Western societies, especially in the USA, success is equated with money and if you convince people that you are successfully solving an important problem, your earnings can grow indefinitely. It is very easy to reverse the direction, so wealth in itself can be equated with success, and excellence in areas that do not bring much money, such as humanitarian work or a life dedicated to science and art, can be experienced as a failure. This obsession with money can completely destroy one's enjoyment of work and turn everything into competition and billing.
AT ANY PRICE
For all these reasons, the pressure on young people to be successful, famous and rich has become enormous; generations of young people today often see only these results, despise the work process or are blind to it. Many people give everything to become seen as successful, fight, scheme or cheat, and the moral side of these situations is not taken into consideration much. The phrase "So young, but already unknown" comes from a Nobel laureate physicist, and it is something that no one wants to hear today, especially since popularity on social networks has become so important. Therefore, it does not have to be a tangible reward - money, favors, titles - it is unequivocally confirmed that every like, even from a person you will never meet, raises the level of dopamine in our brains.
Pressure is not the only danger here, however much there are risks to the mental health of someone who is extremely ambitious and fails to break through. There are extremely competent ones who never became successful. The reasons for this can be different: someone is too shy, another is hermetic, another is engaged in an unpopular activity... What's worse is that there are more completely incompetent people who the whole world knows about, who buy football clubs or manage countries. In the nineteenth century, the concept of anomie was introduced, defined as a state of disharmony between social goals and the means to achieve them, due to which rules and order disappear. It seems, however, that Serbia, and not only Serbia, requires an expansion of this definition, since here anomie has lasted long enough that the rules have been established in a completely perverted way, so that for success and prominence it is necessary to be incompetent and immoral.
THE POVERTY OF MAN AND HIS WORLD
On a more individual level, the high cost of success can be narrowing down the entire world to what you're good at. Unfortunately, you will easily encounter this in most children and adults. If a child sings well but swims poorly, they will most likely avoid swimming lessons and replace them with singing lessons. The subjective experiences of success and failure are intense and important enough that we all know which one we enjoy and which one we want to avoid. For many people, their profession, hobby, personal passion, what others praise them for, becomes the whole world, and they do not try to expand or complete their personality and their life, since that, of course, would not lead to success. We adopted the German expression fah-idiot, but it seems to me that it is less and less in use, that we need it less and less because in modern society more and more people choose such an approach to life.
Success, too, can consume the rest of life. A huge percentage of extremely successful people, at least for a while, lose the ability, and sometimes the desire, to live their life the way they want. Success and applause can become like a kind of addiction, and without them life seems meaningless. A great career often requires all the time, concentration and energy, so that a person cannot even understand how it is that children have grown up, friends have changed, and parents are unrecognizably old. In addition, it can often be difficult for entertainment stars to walk, fly, dine in a restaurant, and the expectations and habits of the public can narrow one's range of expression.
Success can be an obstacle if it leads to comfort and superficiality. When we are successful, we can believe that we already have all the solutions, start avoiding risks, novelties and experiments, become conservative, old-fashioned, pretend to be omniscient. Science, for example, is based on the fact that everything we discovered today should be overcome tomorrow, so scientists should never defend any of their discoveries. That is why the greatest creators are constantly looking for new challenges, changing genres, methods, approaches, just to stimulate creativity anew through learning and discovery, and top athletes change clubs, and sometimes even disciplines, in order not to preserve the "hunger for victory" and the motivation to overcome themselves.
DESPITE THE FAILURES
So, not everything is so simple in the effect of success on our lives. Many of the most important discoveries and sublime works of art in history have come about through unwavering perseverance, the strength to endure the discouragement, sometimes even despair, that great, frequent, and regular failures bring. Probably the most striking example of this is the well-researched beginning of modernity at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. Fine arts will be changed from the roots by a young man with no real talent for drawing, almost without anyone's support and extremely unaccepted, a young man in whose paintings, precisely because of his lack of talent, you can rediscover what painting is, what nature is, what it looked like when the first man saw a sunflower flower or a night full of stars. Literature, despite everything Anglophile intellectuals convince you, was redefined by a man who hardly published anything, who desperately wanted all his notebooks to be burned, who had no sense of belonging anywhere and with anyone, but he wrote with a power and originality that left no one indifferent and his last name became an everyday adjective. The musical world of that era was ruled by an extremely strict conductor, whose symphonies were laughed at by almost everyone, so he predicted that his time would come fifty years after his death, which came true, and today only Beethoven's music is performed more often than his. Not only did Einstein never win the Nobel Prize for the theory of relativity, he was explicitly told as a young man that he would never amount to anything, Freud hardly ever won any prizes, and who knows if we will ever understand what Tesla was actually trying to tell us. Cézanne died unknown, Nietzsche was discovered when he was no longer able to communicate with anyone, Bizet died from the torment of Karmen was not accepted...
Now, imagine what your life would be like if these and similar people gave up the first time they failed at something and were told they were losers. Or fifth. Or thousands.
The author is a psychologist
