success

All I can really see is this fuzzy blackness. It’s not totally dark, but there certainly isn’t very much light. There never really is, here. Not since the lights went out. It was about a month ago, I think. The lights hanging over my head stopped giving that pure, white light they used to and just, blink. Yellow. Occasionally.

But that’s alright, I don’t really need to see. If I wanted to see I would have my glasses on. They’re sitting right next to my bed on a chair that I have just for that purpose. They lay upside down, open fully. But I can’t really move to grab them. I’m sorta stuck where I am, laying on my back, head perched up with my right arm underneath it, followed by pillow, pillow, mattress.

It’s something like 2 in the morning. I’ve just been thinking. Well, it’s more worrying. I’m worrying about being a successful person. That may seem like something stupid to worry about, but it’s less about whether or not I can do it but more about whether or not I will do it. It’s just so hard to define what that even means, to be successful.

Does it simply mean to complete a goal? Surely that’s too easy, because a goal can be as simple as walking down the stairs without tripping and falling. That’s exactly where the subjectivity plays into it. If I break my legs and I finally can walk down the stairs by myself, that would be a big deal to me.

But that’s only a huge feat in my head. The world will look at me walking down the stairs and probably not even notice. It doesn’t seem possible to treat success objectively, as each person considers different things to be successful. When I moved all of the pieces of my bed to my room, something that took a long time since I did it myself, and I put a lot of work in to make it good and I actually made that bed myself, I felt successful. I had achieved my goal, but the world doesn’t really care. The world doesn’t care whether or not I have a bed.

If I figure out how to stop cancer, something that has plagued humanity for generations, that would be something that the world cares about. And they would show it. I would get countless awards recognizing what I have done. My name would go down in history as one of the greats. That’s clearly a success, right?
What if my goal was to create a new way to pack potato chips. I hadn’t even been considering cancer when I set out my goal, and what I ended up with was not a way to pack potato chips. I didn’t complete my goal. Does that mean I’ve failed, even though I found a cure to cancer?

Well I want to be successful, so why not just do alright, come up with something, and consider that a success. The problem with that is it removes the drive to improve. What reason do I have to get better, I’m already successful by default. If there are two people and only one can be successful, suddenly there’s competition to be the best. To be the winner, that’s how you be successful. But is it really? If you’ve gotten third place four times in a row and you REALLY want to get second and you train really hard and you actually make it to second, are you successful? You’ve reached your goal. Is that a problem with the goal or the way success is defined? Is there even a problem with the goal? You haven’t gotten first. Though that limits the amount people are allowed to succeed, saying that if you don’t get first, you’re a failure. That’s calling most everyone a failure; some people do actually get first. I don’t think most everyone is a failure.

And then where does failure play into it? That’s the antithesis of success. Surely something like failure would invalidate success. It has to be impossible for me to fail and succeed at the same time if all that I’m considering is my point of view, but the world thinks differently than me. If I had tried my absolute hardest to make that bed work and I just couldn’t do it, I would feel like I had failed. The world still wouldn’t care whether or not I have a bed.

That’s what’s stressing me out about this. I go through my life day by day, and then eventually something will come up that will matter to the world and it will actually matter whether or not I succeed, but I won’t be able to tell.

Though maybe it is possible to define success. Maybe it’s like a coin. Maybe you can quantify it, with each success being a shiny green coin, and each failure a dull, red coin. And maybe each success and failure can be given a value based on how much of a success it was, or how much of a failure it was, and the coin is given a corresponding size. That’s determined by each person, meaning that if you think that walking down the stairs is a great success, then you get a big coin to match.

Maybe you can treat the green coins like positives and the red coins like negatives, where if you have one of each that are the same size, they turn into a zero. A neutral. Or maybe it’s more like owing money to the world, where for every failure that happens the world expects a success of the same size, maybe not from the cause, but from somebody.

Maybe when someone dies, they take all of their coins, green or red, and throw them into a big pot, and melt it down, and the world refines it and takes out what’s useful to them, and puts that into another, bigger pot, so we can later come back and look into the huge pot as a whole, and see the history of every success and failure as one big bowl of humanity.