What is Success?

Success is a fake. There is no real success in capitalist society. While many people dream wealth, honor, and reputation as their life goals, these are all finite and incomplete concepts. People ideologically consider materialistic value as a criterion for success, but are rich people always successful? Can we say, someone who works for all day and earns a lot of money, is a successful person? Everyone has a different perspective on success, but if you think about success deeply, you will find the result is always a failure; the concept of success was artificially made, while it actually does not exist.

People who live for success will soon fell the same pain that Prometheus have felt and their lives will be something like rolling a rock to the top of a hill. As soon as you put the rock at the top, it will run all the way down to the opposite side of the hill. This will be a never-ending cycle of despair. As materialistic goals are formed by other people (or society) but not yourself, you won’t be able to satisfy yourself forever. Instead, you have to find your goal, purpose of existence, and meaning of life from your inner sense.

But success exists. Success is subjective. You define success. Your definition of success can be the opposite of what a materialistic society expects from you. It can be anything from merely staying healthy to run for, and getting elected, president. Materialistic success is only one version of success. After all, isn’t failure the antonym of success? Who wants to fail in life?

Of course, no one wants to fail in his life. So, I’d like to suggest you follow my questions and find answers; they will help you set your own goal and finally achieve your own success, not the materialistic value that most seeks for and ends up with pain. Find out what you are interested in. There will be something that you can do day and night for many days.

You don’t have to succeed and achieve something from everything that you do. You don’t have to be afraid of failure even before you have started doing anything. You can just do what you want to do and have fun. (only if it is legal and does not harm others.)

Success defined by society is definitely a fake. One may not be happy no matter how successful they are. However, success in life can be achieved by doing what we want to do. Fundamentally, we all want to be happy. Success is being in a state where one is happy. Success is being a state where one is happy with the life they lived, are living, and will live. In order to achieve success, we need to follow our heart and stop outer voices from making our decisions.

Everything is in the mind. Even though the society pushes an individual into a harsh condition, one can be happy and succeed if he endeavors to have an autonomous life. There is no certain answer on human lives, and everyone has different perspectives on successful life. I now think that success is a secondary value that follows after self-actualization. If one can be oneself in his life, every success and failure would define himself, and one can consistently develop. Therefore, all we have to do to live a better life in our society is being ourselves. Understanding oneself, admitting drawbacks, and finding interests would allow us to be ourselves. When we are ourselves, success will come after naturally.

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This essay was a class assignment which was a relay writing. Each person got his own topic (words or sentences) and write an essay while the music plays. When the song ends, one had to pass his essay to a classmate. 

In this way, I wrote the beginning and the conclusion of this essay. Other paragraphs were written by classmates.