Happiness is for ordinary people, too — morning meditation

Robin Cangie
Aug 22, 2017 · 3 min read

What is a morning meditation? To help me build a habit of daily writing, I’m publishing a few thoughts here every morning about ideas that interest and inspire me, mostly drawn from ordinary life. I hope you enjoy them.

From our first day in this world, we are told to strive.

At every stage of our lives, bars are set — the A grade, the top school, the best company, the corner office — and our success, we are told, lives and dies by our ability to scale those bars. Few of us meet them all, and even if we do, the world continually invents new bars for us to strive for.

There’s nothing wrong with wanting to succeed, but I’ve noticed a sinister collective tendency to surround this striving with a language of virtue and use it to define our worthiness. Those who strive and achieve are close to god-like. Those who strive and fail are told to try, try again. Those who do not or cannot play the striving game are shunned at best. At worst, they are treated as less than human.

I think this happens because we have become used to seeing ourselves as capital, our careers as investments. Like stocks and bonds, we build a portfolio of achievements and allocate our skills and abilities — our value, if you will — to the opportunities we believe will have the biggest payoff. Like stocks and bonds, our value either accumulates over time… or it stagnates and declines.

This is an acceptable way to think about one’s earning potential. It is a horrendous way of thinking about our human worth. Yet we conflate the two all the time. Every time we think a homeless person should “just get a job!”, every time we deride the poor as unambitious “takers”, every time we dismiss the skills and ideas of of an older colleague who’s held the same job for 20 years, every time we judge a working parent’s perceived lack of commitment, we conflate their professional achievements and ambitions with their worth as people.

And what if you count yourself among the non-strivers? What if you are unable or unwilling to devote yourself so wholeheartedly to your own professional advancement? What if the dearest parts of your portfolio reside outside the realm of paid work?

You have probably internalized the rhetoric that tells you you aren’t worth as much, that says you don’t deserve to be happy or have nice things, that blames you when things go wrong, that moralizes your perceived failings and treats them as defects of character.

What is the cost of seeing ourselves and others in this way? What do we lose when we downplay and devalue our non-professional, non-monetary achievements?

And why should it be radical to propose that ordinary people — those who didn’t climb the ladder, get the promotion, who above all did not strive hard enough in our collective judgment — deserve happiness and dignity, too?

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Robin Cangie
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