Success is not enough — a new decade, a new challenge and a new hope
The world calls on us to do more than be merely successful. The world calls on us to make it into a better place than it was before we took action.
I don’t have much of an opinion about it, but possibly Zuckerberg understands more than many people that success is not enough.
The world calls on us to do more than be merely successful. There is too much suffering both in the past and in the near and medium term future for our consciences to allow us to rest happily there. Over and over we called on to leave the world being a better place than it was before we acted.
Inevitably most of us fail, most of the time, but I doubt there is a greater peace available to our souls than to be working sincerely for the betterment of life.
We probably all know, somewhere in our psyches that mere success is not enough. There is too much pain and suffering in the world for it to have escaped our notice. Even the very few of us who have been fortunate enough to not experience much of that pain or suffering first hand, at least by the age of adulthood, can hardly have been completely oblivious to it.
The news media are full of reports documenting the latest catastrophe, the latest atrocity, the latest conflict; the latest teenager who massacred their high-school classmates; the latest war that broke out over the control of territory or oil or some other precious supply chain. It’s everywhere you look. You’d have to be psychologically blind not to see it.
There is so much of this suffering all around us that no life, and no project, that is not oriented towards alleviating some of this suffering is likely to satisfy us to any extent beyond the superficial.
The only ambition that really and truly satisfies us in the face of all this misery, is the ambition to actually make the world be a better place.
The only ambition that really and truly satisfies us in the face of all this misery, is the ambition to actually make the world be a better place.
Of course, that does not mean getting ahead of ourselves. For sure we should probably all start by cleaning our rooms! But while we are sorting through the backlog of our personal and business admin, there are some intentions that will make all the petty grind seem worthwhile, and others that will leave us on stage collecting an award for our brilliance while feeling hollow and fake.
Have I actually made the world into a better place? … This is the question that counts.
Afterword
Perhaps the problem with death is not that it comes. Perhaps the problem with death is that we are not ready. And any amount of saying to ourselves that “today is a good day to die” does not make it true if it is not true.
Perhaps today is not a good day to die, but today is a good day to start getting ready. Care to join me?
