14 - Where is the Road Leading to?

Most of us grew up in increasingly competitive capitalistic class-societies, immersed ourselves and became cogs of its operations, as the only means to survive and live in the best possible way. Prospect of a radical qualitative transformation of this socioeconomic system into something else, despite the utopian goals and struggles of our youth, proved non-existent. How good a life one has can be assessed either subjectively or objectively, on the basis of societal and economic norms. Congenital biological attributes, along with acquired skills and education, the social class we are born in, are some the parameters that potentially shape our course in life. Of course, at the end of this journey, ‘success’ and a life’s worth, regardless of how this is assessed and determined can be function of myriads of factors, circumstances and situations, many exogenous, outside our control or influence, others unpredictable or unforeseeable, despite our tendency and efforts to plan and predict with some clarity the future ahead. Before one set out to recount and analyse the factors that have contributed to isolated ‘successes’ or ‘failures’, and a cumulative qualitative evaluation, one must first, both as a judge and the subject of judgment, understand and define ‘success’ and the yardsticks in the evaluation. That is, with a reference always to the spatiotemporal, one needs to understand and define what fundamentally constitutes ‘success’ in life. Is it accumulated material wealth? Is it material and intellectual output and the legacy (or the traces and their longevity of these traces one leaves behind)? Is it a recognition by fellow human beings, in a community or a nation or internationally, horizontally in society or vertically, through one’s field of occupation and expertise in an incessantly progressive division of labour in modern societies, which diffuses and reduces the contribution of each one into the intellectual and material production of society to the infinitesimal.

The question of how successful one’s life and what is its worth has been, is a complex question. One that we normally ask ourselves towards the end, when we take account of the value of a course that is approaching its end. What for most of is a purely subjective evaluation a lot have been said and written, perhaps disproportionately much given the importance of such an undertaking for common mortals. We are not the ones, after all, who could judge our own success, and not many outsiders could do that. In fact, few are interested in those sorts of judgements and evaluations of their lives and those of the common folk they were associated with, during the lifetimes.

But I am reaching a point in time and in my writings where the issue of how good and ‘successful’ and ‘meaningful’ a life concerns and weighs on me, and begs for answers at least with reference to universal criteria and the metrics that society I belong to uses as norms. It is of my own exclusive concern; it is for the sole purpose of resting the consciousness: an a posteriori evaluation of existence has no particular importance, rather no importance outside of oneself. In any case, ‘the way of life’ we chose or guided to embark on, ‘success’ and ‘recognition’ are of existential concern. They are exclusively posited as existential queries from the individual to the individual. While questions of ‘success’ and ‘value’ and ‘worth’, along with the innate want for recognition (Camus wrote: ‘All consciousness is basically the desire to be recognised and proclaimed as such by other consciousnesses’) hover in our minds throughout existence, often torturously, as elements of the broader philosophical question of whether ‘the whole lot’ ha been worth the toil or the more prosaic: ‘What do I aim at? What do I want to achieve? What have I have achieved?’ Death wipes off those question marks, along with the occasional timid, certainly unsatisfactory, and sometimes uncomfortable answers we gave on occasions to ourselves; which, by concluding the vicious cycles of brooding about ‘success’ and ‘achievement’, ultimately, the search for and, maybe, the revelation of a ‘meaning’, makes me wonder whether there is any point of positing such questions and vainly searching for ultimately inconsequential answers.

Yet, I ask this question to myself, hysteron-proteron and by the way in the narrative whilst discussing the dreams and ambitions of a now distant youth, being now at a stage of life devoid of major aims and ambitions for a rapidly shrinking future. Young people, however, as I wrote above, with a few exceptions, set and nurture ambitions, grandiose or modest, along with an ambiguous want of a better life with future prospects, with the ambitions and aims of previous generations, of the grandparents and parents, of friends and colleagues, along with a given level of social advancement, as benchmarks. And their minds design an equally vague ‘success’, as again is guided by the norms of their milieu, and with respect to recognized, valued and distinguished in various domains of social activity.

It was Father who, in one of our recent discussions of ‘success’ in life, that a successful man is one who has achieved the goals and largely fulfilled the ambitions he set out (or others set out for him) when young. I could not agree. I considered such statement contradictory and arbitrary (another one of his unsubstantiated sweeping statements amongst many he used to utter from time to time), as it raises more questions than supposedly having tried to answer –as if such a question could be answered tentatively or answered at all. The world around us changes at a pace and in directions, impossible to imagine and project when we were young; ourselves in it, living and acting, are unconsciously carried away by the river of social and technological evolution. Growing up in this fast-moving world requires effort to grasp these changes along the way and adapt accordingly. Adaptability is clearly a condition of basic survival, let alone of ‘success’, prosperity and distinction. In my case, family and especially the constrained and rather insular environments of Greek society, that is, the circles in which I grew up and with which I interacted, created and established a system of norms and institutions, pointing to relatively rigid goals from an early age, against the back drop of the conservative social reality of my place and time. The establishment of a system of goals and ambitions for young people can again be attributed, as written, to its inherently competitive nature of a class society, even if, in the case of Greece, is somehow distorted when compared with more advanced economies. Such competition encompasses most aspects of social activity; and the more developed a capitalist society is, the more intense it appears, and the higher the demands it places on the individual, as I found out later in life. This, however, opens another topic of discussion.

Perhaps, then, to survive and stay afloat and advance in the journey of life, to manage and close its various chapters, as pointed out by our established social norms, the time and geography, that is chapters in education, love, family, work, to accumulate knowledge and experience, without touching peaks of the material wealth and fame – the reach of a few, is an achievement of a kind in this brutal human arena. And concluding all those chapters, without paying much heed to the richness of the content, can be considered as an accomplishment per se and provide, when reminiscing about them, a satisfactory answer to the call of conscience about the meaning of life towards the end, of how ‘good’ or ‘successful’ or ‘worthwhile’ that life has been.