What is success?
Money is not a reflection of success.
So, what is success? To some, it is finding a purpose for their lives. To others, it is raising the ranks in their career and making a large sum of money. And for some, success is only achieved through happiness. In this day and age, students and adults in their 20s heavily associate success with the concept of money and living a simple and affordable lifestyle. But, something was achieved through going to school, volunteering, finding an internship, and building a career in this rat race world.
The fact is, many of us are doing all of these because, throughout our school days, we’ve been programmed to believe that we need to be successful.
The metric for success isn’t defined. When can you be tagged success? Is it when you have $10 million in your account? Or when you buy a Ferrari? How, exactly, are you able to know when you’re successful?
The competition is stacking up, and society keeps putting undue pressure on everyone. Now, kids are bulldozered with tons of social media posts of people who flaunt their wealth and have become very successful at young ages. We view these people as our role models. They live a life we can only dream of, and we also want to achieve the same level of success.
But the curtain’s closed, and all of these things change – success suddenly morphs with our reality. As we grow older, we realize that success isn’t as easily attainable as we thought, yet our goals remain aligned with those from 30 years ago.
In our mind lies the dreadful thoughts of failure – we feel as if we’ve failed, especially if our lives aren’t organized at 25. Unfortunately, these pressures have affected mental health, and it’s now a focal point of our generation that not many people want to talk about.
For some of us, going to college and constantly working is the norm. We work so hard that our mental health becomes affected. Slowly, we become a victim of our minds. Finally, we are placed in a state where our mental health becomes increasingly affected.
Money is not everything.
The reality of money not being the holy grail sinks deep, or many sons and daughters who witness their patents fall into the money pitfalls. The real question is, does money serve us, or do we serve money? Without a doubt, it is important to be rich in life. But rather than think about this monetarily, the richness that’s been referred to is the richness of our mind by realizing that money is important, but it isn’t everything. If money is everything and our quest to get it becomes consuming, we’ll be rewarded with moral bankruptcy and value decadence. We’ll all be bankrupt when it comes to relationships with others, especially those who matter to us. I know a thing that’s more important than money, and that’s value. This is why some people are so poor; all they have is money.
