Day 26 : Success

Entitlement - it can be most easily defined as the feeling that somebody has that he should get everything that he desires, just by virtue of his desiring it.

This is something that we see a lot in people these days. People just expect for good things to miraculously happen to them. We are so narcissistic in our belief that our life is so star-studded awesome that all good things just have to come our way. We deserve every single happy thing that exists in this universe. You can be the biggest the laziest douchebag the world has ever known, but you will always expect your life to turn up like one of those feel-good movies. You sit on your ass all day, never even pretending to actually make an effort. But in the end, you always expect for your life to have the happy ending that all those famous people have.

I blame them stories that we are told when we are young. We read a three page article on how this guy became the next Mark Zuckerberg, but never really get to read the three hundred page chapter of what he had to do and sacrifice to get to become that. We see them successful people in Silicon Valley, or The Social Network, or Pirates.. , or Wall Street and we just get to thinking that to be successful the basic criteria that you check out is that you have to be smart and selfish and you definitely have to be a dick. If you each of  those, that's about it. All of the other stuff just falls into place. Nahhh.

One other theme in all of them stories is how those successful people in the end find themselves at the top of the mountain only to find that there is no one really around them to celebrate their success with. They are at the pinnacle of success but nobody who is close enough to them to give them a hug and a pat on their back to say, 'dude, you made it.' Now, you would say, that guy has millions for dollars laying around, do you think he even cares he has people around him. He can probably pay for random people to come to him and pat his back or even write a epic ballad singing his praises. He is frigging millionaire. He can do as he damn well pleases. Well, I guess he can.

But I also think all of us have this deep-set need to validated by the people we care for. We are not as insulated from our own feelings as we like to think. We may pretend to be the sarcastic cold hearted hipster jerks we are. However, we are all mush inside. And our feelings are the true chinks in our armors. But I just don't think that is our weakness really, that is mostly what makes our success more worthwhile. Being able to celebrate and share our success with people dear to us makes it more special.

Don't seclude yourself. Don't shed yourself of people close to you. They are not a burden. They are probably the things that would provide you with the crucial incentive to go through with that final push towards glory.

Day 5 : What's the point? - Weekend musings

What sets us apart from other creatures in the animal kingdom is our capacity for feeling and taking decisions based on our feelings and intuition. That's the one things which has brought us this far. It would sad to come this far to only loose our grip on that. Back to the jungle.
Lord of the Flies style.

We still have some residue of the jungle in us. We still feel a weird serenity in the woods and in the open sea. A calm. We always will have that. That beast is always in us. That's what lashes out at everything when we're cornered.

There is also it's curiosity within us that pops out sometimes. Little macabre curiosity in us all. It wants us to go back to our basics. To know what would happen when we all went tribal. How would we fare. How would we fare in a world without the amenities of the concrete jungle. How would we fare if we just left everything. Just drop off the face of the civilized world, as it were.

The survivalists keep preaching none of us stand a chance. That we won't get through a week, by the end of which we would all be begging for the comfort of civilization. They say evolution has made us weak, we just aren't capable of the scavenging rummaging life of the wilderness. The strength in our limbs has been exchanged for better brains, now used basically for consuming online content and useless information.

Twilight Zone had it right. We are just not prepared anymore. Too weak. Too vulnerable. Humans are at the top of the pyramid only because we outnumber everything stronger than us. And that would be our downfall too. We are not made to survive this planet. We're going down, and we're taking everything with us. It's all completely pointless.

~ ~ ~

Oh, yeah. Happy thoughts. Enjoy the rest of your weekend!