Happier, healthier, more successful people

You know that feeling when you sometimes look at an object or hear a word and suddenly it seems different as if you have just noticed it for the first time? It's the moment when you stop considering it on your autopilot and actually look at it and think about it.

That was how I felt all of a sudden when I was reading the excellent book 'Bounce', by Matthew Syed and I saw the word 'successful' in the phrase above. All of a sudden I thought 'a successful person', what would they look like?

And maybe the answer to 'successful' is that it depends what you are measuring. One answer that pops up easily is in the saying: "Life is a game, and money is how we keep the score". So maybe the richer you are, the more successful you are. But that can't be all, because I would not swap places with Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos for all the money in the world, or even for the big chunk of it that they possess. 

'Successful' could also, in the narrower focus of Syed's book, simply mean success in a particular competitive field that you have chosen. He was  a table tennis champion and he writes about cyclists, golfers, chess players and the like. But I'm not sure that being successful at a sport or competitive pursuit makes you a successful person. It's a very impressive result of what you have done, but sometimes goes quite against the 'happier, healthier' part of the phrase. Think Gazza, if you are a Brit. 

Maybe 'successful' could refer to how you are regarded by your immediate society. If you are seen as good, moral, helpful, interesting, could that be a measure of success? Whether you have financial clout or not, could the regard of others be the best way to say that someone has been 'successful'? I know that by this point all of this looking at a single word makes it start to shift and splinter from its casual meaning, but I'd like to see all the ways that I could make sense of it. 

The 'regard of others' version seems a bit more balanced than the financial or sporting successfuls, but still it seems to discriminate against those who are much more private in their lives but still think deeply and care and who you discover to be fantastic individuals when you dig them out of their shells a bit. So what 'society' knows about you may be very superficial and by no means a good way to say that someone has been successful. 

And talking of superficiality, we have all seen the fictional world of 'lifestyle' which is the stock-in-trade of a lot of social media. Influencers - one of the most hateful and ironic words in the English language in my view - make their money by selling an idea of themselves. Usually the idea and image is curated to make many people aspire to it as a 'successful lifestyle'. But the competitive environment of the Internet (in which I suppose your success can be simply measured by number of clicks, so that is at least quantifiable success) means that they have to be noisy and over-the-top to gain views, which often renders their lifestyle so cartoonish that very few people (I hope) would actually subscribe to it. And the corrosive fact at the heart of trying to be successful in this arena is that your life is so airbrushed and titivated that you can clearly see yourself that it is not your real life. So even if the audience believe in your success, it is highly likely that you do not. 

Now there is another side to this, which Angie mentioned to me last week, and that is the question of 'What if you change the rules about success, and look at societies that evolve in different ways from our own?' Our oranges are not the only fruit, and the fact that we even believe in the idea of success could well be - I'd say certainly is - a cultural construct. In a society where you start to accumulate a surplus of food (think agriculture about 5000 years ago) there is a chance that someone will start to have a bigger surplus than other people, and then think of ways to keep that advantage or increase it. They will certainly invent the idea of a granary. But in the previous hunter gatherer societies, there was not the same imperative, because surpluses could not be preserved or carried, so you ate what there was, and the most evolutionarily-beneficial method was to share it all out equally, for everyone's sake. And in such a society, the idea of success could be a bit irrelevant. You might be particularly good at a certain skill, but would defer to others more expert in other skill areas. So societal success was measured by staying alive and healthy as a group, rather than as an individual. The description of the 'San' people in Southern Africa (wikipedia: The San peoples of Southern Africa) does describe their social structures as what we would call egalitarian, even though that is a modern view of what would have simply been the norm for many tens of thousands of years in the history of our species. 

Personally, although it is nice to be financially-comfortable, or well-regarded or to achieve skills and outcomes that could be called 'success', I would fall back on the happy and healthy themselves if you asked me what success meant to me. And looking back on life and thinking about what did happen and what might have happened, I am not going to ask for a refund. I have felt very lucky, and maybe that is an accidental success, to have been loved and to love, and that includes all the kinds of love: family, friends, colleagues, partners, lovers. I do enjoy reading the epitaph that Raymond Carver, the American poet, had inscribed on his tombstone. It was the final, short poem that he published in his final book:

And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth.

by Raymond Carver