Home For Fiction – Blog

for thinking people

New post every MondayHow not to miss one

numbers

How Do You Define “Success” anyway?

December 6, 2017

The big question: How do you define success? But of course, by measuring it, right?

You might think that the need to quantify everything is innate in humans. After all, when our ancestors lived in caves and had to hunt every day for their survival, 4 wild boars versus 3 could make the difference between life and death.

Fast-forward to the present day (Space Odyssey style) and the obsession with counting is more intense than ever. We live in the digital revolution era (with all its problems). Is your camera 12 or 24 megapixels? How many GB of RAM is your computer, your phone, your tablet? How tall are you? What’s your shoe size? Will it be a small, medium, or large coke?

You could argue – and you wouldn’t be wrong – that there is nothing sinister with measuring in that way. We need to be able to organize our life, after all.

The problems begin when you begin to overexpand measuring in adjacent areas. How many megapixels soon becomes “my camera is better than yours”, and, worse still, “I can take better photos than you”. The size of your clothes becomes a synonym of your value as a person. The size of your breasts a way to define you as a sexual being.

Sooner or later, we reach to the most absurd measurement of them all: the size of your bank account as a sign of your success.

define success
It will take far more than looking at your bank account to define success. Good morning lemmings
(more…)