Obsession with Success.
This is more about ‘obsession with success’. Too many have taken what I call ‘the nation-state’ definition of success which is being ‘useful’ to the state. You can get a two-bob medal for getting shot whilst harassing other nation-states for the benefit of the war-mongers and their sponsors. You can pass nation-state exams and become a ‘professional’. We cannot run nations without trained people. You are trained for the benefit of the nation-state. Success is commonly viewed through bent telescope. Success is associated with career milestones, financial achievements, and social recognition. A woman could say to other women: “I have a successful husband. ” The message is that she has snagged a man that pays for her every whim. To the man, The successful job is a key to obtaining a beautiful wife. Homeless men do not get married. It takes little time for a female to gauge a man’s potential for financial support. A good man has always been defined in terms of what is good for women. “He is a good man. He is selfless and cares for his wife and children.” Since feminism, manliness is now associated with the number of females that a male has bedded.
The natural definition of success is to be a good family person. For males, it was to be a good father, and for females, it was to be a good mother. Being a good father also meant bringing home a significant income.
Success in the inescapable propaganda of the modern world is geared to success in careers, sport, or fame. This is heavily pushed through the education system. Previously, males went to male only schools where they received a harsh education which prepared them for the hard knocks of male life. It also taught them to accept the consequences of their actions. It stressed the concept of success and competition through the sports field and the exam system.
Under ‘equality’, feminism put pressure to class males as ‘toxic’ whilst demanding that women follow the path of these ‘toxic’ males. If women were wonderful and males were toxic, there should be a demand that men follow the superior example of women. I now find girls and women are suffering by following the path of males. I always remember the joke about another country: “Work is punishment for not steeling.” Work is called work because we would only do it if we were paid. If we lived somewhere lush and warm, we could walk out an pick some fruit and with minimal effort, live an easy life. Rich women tend not to work. I find it strange that women demanded to do this work that one would only do if paid. Every country on my travels that I have raised the question, married male were expected to hand over the wage packet at the end of each week. The older women will also tell you that: “men earned more in those days.” This would be due to the higher spending power. My house in North Perth was built in 1940 and would have been built in ten weeks by a group of ten blokes for a small family where only the man was working. Two above average incomes are now needed to buy in this area. The consequence of women propagandized into the workforce is a doubling of land prices. There was no win. This was all carried on a concept of success that was geared to careers.
The selling of success to the young has consequences. It causes an obsession with success.
Here is Google’s AI response:
Obsession with success, while potentially driving high achievement, can also lead to negative consequences like anxiety, burnout, and a skewed sense of self-worth. It’s crucial to find a balance, recognizing that success is not the sole measure of a fulfilling life and that personal well-being is equally important.
Success can be defined as the achievement of goals. Who is setting the goals? Did the individual set the goals or were they decreed by a nation-state, and education system, family, friends, or media system. Is it possible that the individual has been indoctrinated? I find this fascinating. I have fought this obsession with success all my life. I often word it this way. I went to a British grammar school. You had to pass exams to get there. There was always the question: Are you good enough to be in the top class? In my final year, I won the school mathematics prize for that year’s cohort. I liked motorcycles and I was good at mathematics. Advice was to study engineering with the hint that it was my choice! I passed special exams and went to Imperial College, London, originally set up as a place of excellence by Prince Albert in the days of Queen Victoria. We were given so much ‘homework’ that it was impossible to complete the work in the available time and live a life. The The tasks were very complex verging on impossible. I rejected the academic elitism around me. To me, it was a strange environment where people ignored each other. I eventually passed. I had developed a dislike of being in soulless rooms with persons with the single goal of passing exams. It gave me an obsession with perfection, and an obsession with success. Not to succeed was akin to failure. The opposite of success is not failure. Although my environment had given me an obsession with success it was tempered with a distrust of a system that only values success. I could word it as an education system that only values success. I remember a high school teacher giving us a rant when the class was less than cooperative. It went along the lines of: “If you don’t get on with this you will finish up as failures.” You may not be able to find the oddity in this due to your upbringing. If say half of any group sitting an exam ‘pass’ and half ‘fail’, we guarantee fifty percent fails. Should we label half the society as failures. My gripe this: At the eleven plus at the age of eleven, only fifteen percent gain entry to the grammar school. I got the school maths prize out of a cohort of say one hundred, at a guess. That puts me in the top one percent of the top fifteen percent. Word was that only the best got to Imperial College with an implied to one and a half percent. These are rubbery figures but you will get my point. Sir Thomas Rich’s Grammar School was giving students ‘fails’ even though they were earlier classed in the top fifteen percent. Imperial College was giving fails even though students were already classed as being in the top lets say two percent. My memory is of two students committing suicide. The doors of the tower in the centre of Imperial College quadrangle are locked to this day to prevent suicides. The college still has an issue with suicide. I was part of a process that drove students to kill themselves. I survived! To it’s credit, it did give me a mind to question outside the box. It encouraged me to be analytical. I can understand why a nation-state needs trained people. The nation-state cannot operate without trained people. The nation-state is more efficient with trained people. The system of training at elite levels is needed, but I am very aware of the effects that it has on those put through it.
When I was young, only the males were pushed to this extent. Feminism was propagandized using the documentation from the Jewish Bolshevik take-down of Russia. Marxism appears to be a way of destroying a nation rather than a way of running a nation. My attempted readings of Das Capital led me to believe it was a book full of gibberish. One must analyze all ‘isms’ with the same skepticism. My issue is that girls are now pushed through this same academic nonsense. Let’s start with some logic. If men are toxic and women are wonderful, why would women aspire to be like men? Should it not be that men should aspire to rise to the exemplarity levels of women? As with most propaganda and news, logic plays a negligible role and the populous repeats it as if true. The real point of this paragraph is that girls are now pushed through this sausage machine to ‘academic success’. When males do something wrong or fail, they shout ‘Fuck it. Let’s go have beer. Women, on the other hand, tend to hold their failure inside. Women suffer from this treatment more than males. They now have higher levels of unhappiness. Success to a female before Jewish promoted feminism, was a happy family. Is it anti-Semitic to mention that most of the spuikers of feminism were Jewish? It is nonsense anyway as Semitic people originate from the middle east. A Palestinian is Semitic. Most modern Jews have no blood ties to Abraham but were forced converts by a king in Khazaria. Yet most Christians are scared of being labeled an ‘anti-Semite’ through bizarre logic and propaganda, as they are scared of being declared Islamiphobic. Just as they are scared of being labeled a failure. I spelt Islamiphobic incorrectly to show that it is a made-up word. I’ll use my spelling not the spelling of those that invented the word. It is time for Christians to ‘invent’ anti-Christianism. It is time for people to invent anti-West, which is a cop-out for saying anti-White, Whites being the most endangered ethnicity as it is destroyed by out-breeding and diversity.
Here is a cry for help from somebody that followed a similar line to me:
Hello. I’m a 26 y’old engineer, living in a 3rd world country. Besides that, I got a good job in the place I’m located. I’m doing very good and everyone says how good I’m at my work. All of my life, I always dreamed about having lots of money, and making good salaries and everything related to this. Life is going to directions that maybe I’ll get this dream someday, if I keep in the good path I am. The problem about all this is: I’m absolutely obsessed with this future (it can even never exist). I can’t think about other things beside having money, going into better position in work, work harder and better. I feel like I can’t enjoy anything, I can’t have fun with things in life, I can’t see no more thing besides this imaginable future about having more money that I have now. All the world seems slow paced, and this future seems coming too much slow. This anxiety and wait is consuming my life.
Trying to steer this man out of this will be very difficult. The task of de-programing will be immense. He has an obsession with success. He also describes his success end-goal. His obsession is so great that it appears that he cannot enjoy the moment. I have the same issue with those waiting for retirement. My attitude is enjoy today as well as look forward to the future. I am sitting in seat sixty-six on a Like-Bus traveling from Kyiv to Odessa in Ukraine. It is warm due to summer. The woman in the seat in front enjoys taking selfies of herself. I mentally reject her because she has the puffed lips from some stupid procedure. The driver struggles with the gearbos as there is a crunch between gears which is probably a gearbox wear issue. There are signs to buckle our seatbelts but there is no seatbelt on my seat.
Our man in the story may never rid his obsession with success nor his definition of success. I would say that his early success at school sent him into a system that destroyed his chance of happiness in life. I cannot decide if the nation-state is at fault or him for letting it happen. However, he was in no position to know the outcome of such education. The effect on girls of chasing career is that it takes them close to the end of child bearing years and it also causes them to use logic to control life’s choices rather than instinct. You can abuse me as much as you like, but I can’t help those that will not see. I have to tell the harsh truth to be effective. Jesus also told the harsh truth which got him nailed to a scaffold.
As we pass the fields of sunflowers, I notice that they all face the same direction. How do they do that? If a sunflower can face the same direction as all the other sunflowers, I have to assume that it has mechanisms to do so. I follow the same logic tor reason that we have built into us similar mechanisms to ensure the continuance of our species. Thus all males of appropriate age are predisposed to find suitable females interesting. I can assure readers, that when an ‘interesting’ female enters my field of view, all other thinking processes cease and my brain gets and instruction: “Female in vicinity. Concentrate all activity on said female.” I can assure you that when an interesting female, particularly if she acknowledges me or gives me the wry smile, or wiggles her body parts in front of me, my mind goes blank of all previous items and concentration is on said female. I have to assume that females get a similar action when suitable males are noticed looking in her direction. My thinking is controlled somewhere beyond my control which would be my reptile brain otherwise known as subconscious whilst my behaviour is controlled or rather restricted by my neocortex. Fear of rejection might prevent the average male from making some sort of communication. Where does the fear of rejection come from? Is this brought on from our fear of failure? About an hour ago, I asked the good looking girl across the aisle of this bus what the driver was saying. She gave me a happy smile that indicated she was happ[y that I had communicated. She spoke back in Ukrainian, so that went no-where. It was a spurious question. I did not plan asking her. It happened spontaneously. I find spontaneity works well as neocortex thinking brings in too many negatives and also causes the wrong facial expressions.
We still have not solved the man’s obsession. Let us have a look at some quotes to further the thinking.
“Keep death and exile before your eyes every day, along with everything that seems terrible – by doing this, you will never have an unworthy thought nor an excessive desire”. Epictetus
I have had to accept that I am rarely perfect. Many claim my success at enjoying life. However, I have to use an element of logic. When teaching people to use my database, on the subject of errors, I reasoned that humans make about one in twenty errors, which is five percent. These are rubbery figures to enable thinking on the topic. When I was a mathematics and physics teacher, my best students would only get ninety-five percent in tests and exams. In engineering, when making calculations, we do a side calculation on the expected error in the answer. A bridge may be calculated to carry two-hundred tons plus or minus five percent. I taught my students to follow strict calculation procedures with all the equal signs under each other and without jumping lines of logic. Bright people are prone to jumping lines and making inappropriate assumptions. I usually have to wait for them to make a catastrophic stuff up to convince them of following strict procedures in calculations. I simply assume that five percent of all my decisions are wrong. I assume that five percent of my transport booking are wrong. My flight out of Dubai last year left minutes after I arrived in Dubai. I had not noticed the clash of times and had to enjoy two days in Dubai.
Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better. – Samuel Beckett
Kipling wrote the ultimate stoic poem If…
If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you, But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting, Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies, Or being hated, don’t give way to hating, And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;
If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools, Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken, And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools:If you can make one heap of all your winnings And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss, And lose, and start again at your beginnings And never breathe a word about your loss; If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch, If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you, If all men count with you, but none too much; If you can fill the unforgiving minute With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!
Here is another cry for help:
I am currently consumed by my unhealthy desire to succeed in life. As a result, I am usually feel jealousy, self-loafing, depression, and powerlessness. I want to change.
Since my childhood, I was taught that success is good. Success gives you food on the table. Success also gives you respect.
As I grew up, various experiences have shown me that life can be pointless. People prepare in their childhood by studying, only to get a job they hate, only to retire once their health fails.
The key part here is: “I was taught that success is good.” The person’s belief in success was not internal but external. The key realization for somebody is that it is others that indoctrinated you that ‘success is good’.
We need to individually rethink our relationship with success. It is inappropriate to wait for structural change. As individuals we must get back into the driving seat of our own lives. Only you can alter this situation. I do it on vacations sitting in strange places with strangers. At seventy four, the most influential year in my life was driving a car from England to Kathmandu. That one year stands out more than decades of my life.
Whilst on vacation, I roam with seven kilograms of wheeled luggage measuring 20x30x40mm. I carry a lightweight knapsack with my 1.3kg LG Gram notebook that I using at this moment in an Odessa café. This will fit in my wheeled carry-on home built luggage when needed. I travel light like a well-off tramp. I get plenty of time to evaluate my life situation. My wrist and hip are recovering from a motorcycle racing accident. I know I only have about five years of sensible time left.
The picture below is the result of a visit to a café in Russia. She was inspired by my stories, which, of course included my 1975 overland drive from England to Kathmandu, but also my ’round the world by train’ adventure that brought me to that café.
To break free from the achievement trap, there is a need to take slow down or stop. At a suitable interruption-free situation, one must think about why we are working so hard. Consider doing things a different way.
I sometimes think success is like chasing the end of the rainbow. Once you get near to the end of one goal, you set another goal in a never-ending extension of goals. Can you remember reaching an end goal where you stopped and ceased to invent more goals? You are the big part of the problem if you constantly set new goals. The desire to do so may have been inculcated into you at a younger age but you never broke the habit.
I drive a 2007 Volkswagen Caddy that I bought from a friend that was in need of money. He was careful mechanically so I knew he would have chosen a good one. I put red dots all over it. However, my motorcycles tend to be immaculately prepared and maintained and thus best in their class. I wear Hawaii shirts. I do not conform for the sake of conformity or normality.
One thing I have noticed about success is that it is often more to do with the random timing of opportunity. Luck seems to play a large roll in success. I remember a successful gym business failing when it tried to move into another area. Luck is underrated in the achievement of success. Two may work hard, but one gets the lucky break. Never assume that you are special because you achieved success. The suicide mortality rate was 14.2 per 100,000 in the general population. For male musicians, singers, and related workers demonstrated the third-highest occupational suicide rate at 138.7 per 100,000.
Here is a comment by tennis champion Andre Agassi from his autobiography “Open” whilst analyzing his situation after winning his first Grand Slam:
“Now that I’ve won a slam, I know something very few people on earth are permitted to know. A win doesn’t feel as good as a loss feels bad, and the good feeling doesn’t last as long as the bad, not even close”.
Andre Agassi mentions his race to achieve fame and success did not end there. There were new goalposts including the world number one ranking and gold-medal at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics.
“I marvel at how unexciting it is to be famous, how mundane famous people are. They’re confused, insecure and often hate what they do. It is something we always hear – like that old adage that money cannot buy happiness, but we never believe it until we see it ourselves.”
Success is a mirage. Success is a castle in the beach-sand. Famous and rich people often end up hooked on escapisms including alcohol and drugs. Your success scenario will not make you immune from depression. The definition of success is how you define yourself.
Feminism (just another ism) redefined success for women.
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