Measures of Success
It’s been a few years since I gave up the goal of “success”. By this, I mostly mean financial or capitalist success. I gave up because I started to really understand the systems that funnel us towards this goal and could recognize why success, especially financial success wasn’t a goal worth attaining.
I could also see, after decades of trying to climb ladders and get raises, that my family was getting derailed from a more important pursuit: happiness. My partner and I were career focused, spending more hours in the day apart rather than together. We started to recognize that finding a career which led to happiness was more important than financial success.
This understanding has been critical in our approach to unschooling and home education. Most current education is geared towards building a core set of knowledge designed to help young people advance into a career. The success of this model is measured primarily by how well the student does in a capitalist workforce. There is little room for mental health, non-material happiness, etc. in this approach to education. By decentering financial or capitalist success as the goal of education, it helps open up a vision of what an alternative measure might look like; one based on happiness, connectedness, peace, or any other measure that might give one a sense of fulfillment.
It would only make sense for us, in our deschooling process, to evaluate what our measure of success might be as adults.
Yes, we need enough money to get by and that’s important because we do need food and shelter and those necessities are becoming more expensive every day. When I talk about the goal of financial success though, I’m talking about the generation of surplus wealth beyond what one family would usually need. Most people would use the term “getting ahead”, although that immediately begs the question for me: ahead of whom?
After securing an income to meet our basic needs (it’s less than you might think), our shift has now focused to other goals: spending time together, modelling consentual relationships, living peacefully, lowering our environmental impact, becoming more reslient and less dependant on a crumbling economy.
I’m writing about this for two reasons: first because I think it’s worth the reminder that financial success is only one measure on which to focus, only one of endless possibilities on which to focus one’s time and energy. Second, because I’m feeling quite shaken in this focus lately.
I suspect it’s from spending so much time with my family in recent weeks, who very much still place emphasis on financial success. I haven’t concerned myself with other people’s opinions in quite a while, but in spending a lot of time thinking about my father’s accomplishments (financial and otherwise) aand also his opinion of me.
And potentially my lack of accomplishments.
For the record, I know my dad loves me and values me for my own approach to life. I don’t think he’s disappointed in me, I just wonder what else I might have been able to accomplish if my goals had been more inline with a mainstream approach.
This way of thinking is fairly useless and a waste of time - I know this. I think I wanted to write about this today to acknowledge how deep these cultural norms run and how the influences and pressure of mainstream capitalist culture show up when you least expect them.
By writing down my own goals, I feel like I’ve reaffirmed my commitment to swimming upstream, to living life by my own rules, by focusing on what works best for my family and I rather than what the system expects of me.