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The Backstory
A friend at work prompted this subject
when she was writing about ‘decoding success’. It made me think too - in our capitalistic world, how do we define success? What
is success and is it the same everywhere and every time? Let’s say everything
about us – professionally and personally – remains constant. Now, would you be
happier if you were in free-market heaven US? And what about tightly controlled North Korea? Would the same professional achievements lead to the
same idea of success? Would the ideological drive override the thirst for
material success?
Or would you be happier if you’d
achieved it all in the blooming 1960s than now? Try this with a few more
questions and you’ll probably agree that what we call success could be so
different in these different times and circumstances. So it’s so much a product
of a varying set of factors that include material success, professional
achievement, ideological drives and more. Perhaps Maslow’s
hierarchy of needs would have so much to add here.
Anyway, let’s get back to
capitalism for now. There’s little denying, that today, capitalism is the force
that influences our personal lives, professional decisions and more importantly
our political and economic systems. While there’s opposition to it, it mostly
does find a way to call the shots, in part or as a whole. The fact that success
is more often than not defined, or at least described, in terms of material
success and wealth generated is testimony to hoe much capitalism affects our
lives.
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| The Mona Lisa, perhaps the most famous painting in the world, was painted by Leonardo da Vinci in the 1500s. But do we call Leonardo a gifted, master artist or a successful artist? |
So capitalism shapes the world
around us in such a manner that it influences so many of our decisions,
including about our work. Jeff Hammerbacher, the man who’s credited with
coining the word data science, also had another important set of words to say.
In this ‘post-truth’ era though, I really cannot guarantee if he said it, even
after some research. Anyway, what he supposedly said was, “The best minds of
our generation are thinking about how to make people click on ads.”
While not all great minds may be preoccupied
with creating click-baits, that one-liner is really quite telling. Doesn’t that
tell you how much capitalism influences our ideas and our professional choices?
And clearly, what affects our professional decisions is bound to affect our
happiness quotients as well. Quotient! Look it me trying to quantify happiness,
another gift of capitalism maybe.
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| Adam Smith was the first to spot the invisible hand. Aren't invisible things difficult to regulate? |
So where does capitalism derive
that power to affect our happiness then? Well what’s inherent to capitalism is laissez-faire – the idea of a free
market where private ownership is the boss, where things are left free to take
their own course. Here, it’s the invisible hand, as
Adam Smith wrote centuries ago, that runs the show.
And as this invisible hand pushes
people to maximise profits, it provokes competition. So while it implies that
the quality of products and the costs of production are constantly worked upon
and innovation thrives, it also sparks a fear of missing out (FOMO in our lingo
today) and often kills the idea of taking things slow. (There are other issues
with capitalism too, but this essay doesn’t contend with those.)
An Individual’s Conundrum
So while it is good for economic
prosperity and should ideally be self-moderating, capitalism has other by-products
in terms of how it affects individuals professionally, personally and
emotionally. Of course, one may also argue the other way, that it also has its
rewards. Individuals reap the benefits of professional success too then and
amass wealth. But that’s just capitalism’s nature; the price payers always
outnumber the beneficiaries.
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| While desks today look cleaner with the advent of computers, the work load has perhaps only risen. Or is your desk still as messy? Picture credit: Carrotstown |
Professionally, it pushes people
relentlessly and can lead to individuals burning out – physically or mentally –
as they are being driven by their immediate needs, the invisible hand and the
social contexts around them. And like the click-bait example shows, it
literally can make people opt for peculiar yet paying jobs that may not make
one happy. Now tell me, how many times have you sidelined something you loved
to do for a job that paid more?
Personally, it just takes away so
much of your time. It makes you work more. Perhaps one the top economists of
all time, and a ‘successful’ one too given his stock market adventures, JM Keynes
had predicted almost a century ago that as our economies develop, our
future generations will have to work less and less and will have more time for
leisure. Well, wonder what happened. Most of us have really just been working
more.
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| Sacrificing those Saturday night plans with friends for the work meeting to crack a deal for the company. How tough is that choice? |
Working more is great when passion and interest are combined, but most
people aren’t that fortunate. And even for the ones who are, work really knows
ways to get the better off them. Haven’t you been forced to call off Saturday
night plans with friends for work? It’s easy to see now where DJ was coming
from with that Rang De dialogue.
And well, we all know how all of
that can play on us emotionally. While some thrive of professional challenges
and entrepreneurial adventures, for many professional burdens can hurt our
state of mind, and our relationships. Professional ups and downs really affect us,
and the feeling of being in a perpetual maze or race can leave us distraught and isolated. And while we all have our coping mechanisms, don’t
we need a little more than those?
The Success Equation
It’s a cost then, which is
attached to the prize. In our individual quests for professional success, we
are often told hard work is the only option. Even so much of the content we
consume suggests the same – let's look at Suits where the Harvey and Mike are always
shown working till late in suits while their personal relationships are underplayed – or the exact opposite in form of an escape from it all – for instance Two And A Half Men where work was hardly ever featured.
And while hard work is not
something to shy away from, it’s important to prioritise amidst our individual
and combined struggles to achieve economic prosperity and emotional happiness,
because aren’t those, in their subjective proportions, crucial conditions of
being 'successful' in life, as we know it today?
Will I sleep better if I complete
that presentation for office in time or will I be happier if I play with my unperturbed
beagles in the mud for a little while? Such tradeoffs, it’s almost criminal. And
while capitalism will always prioritise profits, shouldn’t we prioritise happiness
as well? And the twain shall only meet in a fine balance, if at all. While they
derive so much from one another, they can also turn on each other.
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| We are all born different. So while we can have common measures to contextualise success, can we really have a universal set to define it? And more importantly, should we? Picture credit: Maya Eye Photography |
So how one defines success may always be a function of our achievements, our emotional wellbeing (those are
so subjective too), the tradeoffs, our ideological inclinations and our
backgrounds. There can be so much too. While to some the achievements may
outweigh the tradeoffs, to others the tradeoffs may be heart wrenching. To many
ideological drives may define their route to success, to others material wealth
may be paramount.
And while I’ll let you work on your own equation of success,
let’s look at success as a combination of elements and in the
context of the times and ideas that shape our world. Only then perhaps, will we really be able to
answer, how 'successful' we are. And however far or close one may find oneself to that 'success' and its contributors, do keep working, but perhaps in a different way, and maybe even on a different thing, because work still will always remain one of the keys to whatever we call success in the end.
PS: The essay title itself may have been click-bait here. Couldn't resist. Also, the
use of the words cost, equation and quotient among others in this essay are by
themselves also indications of how our minds (at least mine) have been attuned to evaluate things
in life – in form of (two-way) transactions, even when we have Mastercard ads on loop, reminding us that some moments in life are ‘priceless’.
