Have you noticed, when you open any of the social media apps, that there’s a new product in the market which everyone is trying to sell you? Though it isn’t a new product, it’s just been repackaged and enforced onto you to buy it without asking your opinion or your will.
That product is called “Success”. A product with the highest credibility, sustainability, patience and without excuses, as they call it.
The type of content with heavy titles like “Motivation/Inspiration/Success” was earlier curated to make us feel happy or at least to not play with our sanity. Today, everybody is selling success, giving tips, shortcuts, the road to glory and whatnot; they are pushing everyone to leave their so-called bad zone also known as “Comfort Zone” and start “Hustling” to find something which is called “Success”, which is just an insanely bizarre idea.
They are also creating panic among people about what they are not doing and what they should have been doing, giving people anxiety, making them live in desperation, forcing them to find unnecessarily struggles in their life, take on issues which weren’t even their before, and my personal favourite is – Find purpose in life because you only have one life, whereas indirectly convincing them to accept their own personal concepts and interpretation of success.
I have just one question to ask and probably the most important one. The first thing we all should have asked ourselves is this.
“What is the meaning of success to you?”
Is it fame and a lot of money, with anxiety, loneliness and a lot of medicines, or an expensive car, to take on to that same broken road and hours of traffic? Or, a big house, to show how luxuriously you are in a big unnecessary debt? Or, to buy expensive clothes/ shoes/phones because let’s be practical, you never know when you will find Karan Johar on the streets and he would cast you in ‘Student of the Year’ or probably Bimbo of the century, right? Drinking expensive alcohol in the club while shouting I love my life, moreover assuring your body that it won’t die a smooth death or my personal favourite the popular one “YOLO”.
I don’t have a problem with any of it. My problem is how can anybody else (applied to our parents/spouse too) decide the meaning of success for someone else and shove it down their throat and force them to digest it. Why should anybody be fighting and hustling to find something which is not even theirs in the first place? I’m not saying earning money or buying possessions are wrong, I’m happy for those who dream of that and work to achieve it.
My question is “Is this your own conscious choice or it’s something which you have been forced to believe because you are stuck in this pretentious, hollow ecosystem which forces you to follow its definition of happiness and success no matter how it destroys you from within?”
Are you sure it’s you has taken these decisions for you? Are you sure it’s not because of that guy/girl on the internet? Are you sure it’s not because of your parent’s expectations? Are you sure that you are sure?
Who doesn’t have problems in life, who doesn’t suffer? What if they plan to conquer their difficulties with patience and perseverance? What if they don’t want to measure themselves on the scale of this society? What would you call them an underachiever or unambitious?
If that’s the case, then I’m afraid I won’t be considered successful in my entire life. I don’t dream of building a multi-million dollar company or buying expensive commodities to showcase how happy and fulfilling my life is.
It’s no wonder half of this generation is living on pills and the other half doesn’t even know that they need those pills.
Think about it.