What would have seemed incomprehensibly dull and stultifying to your 16 year-old self turns out to be a pretty sweet deal when you hit 40.
Of course you already know there’s no ambition ceiling.
As soon as you have a little, you want a little more. When you have a lot, you can imagine having + doing + being a lot more.
When you have nothing, making the ends meet and being able to knot them off is a $#@%* triumph. When you’re living the proverbial good life, a renovated kitchen is all that’s standing between you and perfection.
Maslow had it down cold. If there’s not an obvious need or gap, human nature is such that we’re gonna create one just to give ourselves something to chase down, to long for, to believe in.
And forget about the mythic ideal of balance. Just because you get 110% of your RDA of Vitamin C, doesn’t mean you can’t still be woefullyiron deficient.
After all, you can be the richest woman in the solar system and still fight a (very public) 25 year-long battle with your weight.
So, if you feel like the world’s most awesomely-successful-on-paper failure or most fraudulent success story, you’ve got a lot of company. Like, say, most of us.
*No, he wasn’t angling for my spare change, thanks for asking.
What are your oxymoronic tendencies?
P.S. You can choose to want less.
Liking the way you think, especially as Maslow's hierarchy is currently dictating my life goals. Good to know I'm not the only fraudulent, waiting to be caught out, living on luck story out there 😉
I'm not a success story, on paper or in real life…but I am a freshman undergraduate, so I have time. This is an interesting post, especially because lately I've been of the all-or-nothing attitude…it's nice to be reminded that success takes many shapes!
Success is definitely relative, and how we define that mark is definitely up to us. I discovered that I was using (of all things) facebook as a benchmark for how successful I was at life. Seemed like more and more people were getting married, and going on exotic holidays and having fat, cute babies. It took a while to realise that it was a bad idea to measure success by my peers lives, especially on facebook when we all tend to paint a shiny perfect picture, and minimise the flaws. Good post hey. 🙂
I just have to say YES!
So true! My bf and I recently bought a car together, but neither of us would have been able to do so alone. I have the good credit history, despite having little to no cash available. And he has lots of assets in the bank but had no credit history. We joke that I only look good on paper and only his bank believes he has money.
Oh my gosh, I loved this. Thank you. I think success is totally relative, and if we’re happy, content and grateful, that makes that “milestone” a success. At least, that’s how I try to look at it.
So glad it resonated with you, Marie <3