People say that being successful and/or rich comes with a price. People envy you, attack you, try to take from you, and even hate you. Makes me wander why anyone would want to walk the path of success as it is in the world. Is that what we want success to be? A struggle to achieve and then a struggle to maintain it?Aside from the obvious jealousy that consumes most people, people are also willing to go to extremes to take away the success of another person. Why do we live this way? We have created a construct that brings out the absolute worst in us and only awards a minority of people any kind of reward.
What is success these days but an opportunity to feel superior? It is a destructive force that drives a greater wedge between people, increasing separation. Our fragile egos cannot handle seeing someone else succeed - there are very few people who feel no envy. So why do we continue to participate in a social structure that causes people to hate each other?
Consider all of the things that have been and are done in the name of success: drugs (steroids - Armstrong ring a bell?), lying, cheating, stealing, framing, physical abuse, murder, verbal abuse, self abuse (bulimia, anorexia, self judgement), teasing - to name just a few. What happened to doing things for the love of what we're doing? What about participating in events simply to enjoy them, without trying to inflate our egos, prove ourselves, or rule the world?
Consider what we are willing to do to animals in order to win: beat, train in an abusive way, keep locked up, give drugs, and generally remove them completely from their natural environments and requirements in order to place them in a man made environment that makes their only purpose in life winning. Where is the consideration for the animal, in terms of what the animal would want - not the desires that we impose on them? For example: racehorses are taken our of their natural lifestyles completely, kept in their stables all day, except for 2 hours when they are training. They are fed high-energy diets , as opposed to natural forage high in fibre. They literally do not know how to be horses when they are retired - seeing a racehorse come "off the track" (being retired to live like a normal horse) - which by the way happens before the age of 8 years in most cases (to give you an idea, horses normally live to 40, depending on their histories, but it can also be as long as 60) - is a sad thing to see. They walk around in wonderment, they hardly know how to graze - their bodies are so used to being buzzed and their heads held high that it is actually uncomfortable for them to graze for more than a few minutes at a time until their bodies get used to it.
I don't see the appeal in winning. It seems more like a sham - something we inflate the importance of so that everything that actually does matter doesn't seem quite so important anymore. What's so important about poverty when you're busy chasing your dreams of success?
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