It’s been quite some time since I started studying and getting interested in neuroscience, behavioral science, biology and, on a wider scale, on the scientific view of the human experience. For many years, I couldn’t reconcile my artistic and spiritual self with the more pragmatic and scientific one. I felt I had to take sides and choose one, repelling the other. After I made peace with this duality (which indeed generates conflicts and requires work to achieve a peaceful and collaborative state between the two), I started to gather as much information as possible about what favors or hinders our human conditions, on several different levels. Lately, I’m quite sensitive about this topic: the apparently unstoppable drive that pushes us to a faster, more superficial, performance oriented reality whereas only the short term reward and recognition seem to generate fulfillment. How much do we really know about how harmful these patterns are? How aware are we that on the path to our idea of success, we’re drinking from a poisoned well that perhaps prevents success itself?
I’ve said it several times, yet I feel it’s never enough to repeat it: success ain’t absolute. There is no universal definition of success (despite how we tend to depict it in fame, fortune and wealth) and it’s important that any human being asks the right questions, in order to find out whatever success will mean to him or her. One thing is sure, though: success is a feeling. And it’s often confused with achievements. Getting rich, famous, buying a big house, getting married etc ain’t success; these are achievements. We can visualize, walk toward and finally achieve something that’s important to us; yet it’s crucial to understand that no achievement can deliver the feeling of success. First of all, time will tell if what we have achieved is aligned with our idea of success, because knowing what we want isn’t that simple in the first place. Do you remember Jack Sparrow’s compass? It points to the thing you want the most but, well, how do we really know what we want?
Here comes the first issue: we are all told and taught what we should be wanting, in order to be (= feel) happy and successful. This happens since we are kids and it comes from various sources (our parents, our social circle, the culture and place we’re born in etc). Very few people are raised to actively pursue their own search for happiness, rather than various achievements that are supposed to deliver a sense of peace and fulfillment. For the majority of us, a serious and continuous work of deconstruction is required to first identify that for a bunch of reasons we won’t mention now, we can’t take for granted that our own (real) values match with the ones we were raised with.
Moving on, if and whenever this quest of deconstruction is accepted, here comes the second issue: the impulse to opt for shortcuts and simplify things without having a clue of their complexities. A couple of practical examples: the strong influence and entrance of technology in music has allowed many practitioners to completely kill the processes that took one person from a point of little to no knowledge, till mastering a skill. And, even if you are truly skilled, the temptation to cut and cut and cut the processes in the name of a faster result, is always there knocking at your door. If we could teleport ourselves from one place to another, it would be extremely “effective”: yet, we’d miss every little detail of the journey and any sort of learning we can get from it, wouldn’t we?
One more example is the advent of AI. By entrusting everything we can to a machine that delivers something fast with no effort from our side, we’re basically killing all the benefits we’d receive by actually doing such things ourselves. Firstly, the creation and strengthening of brain connections that can only be created and work if our mind is actually challenged. Being challenged, getting to work and solving problems feeds self esteem, develops our personality and allows us to count on our resources for future problems, knowing we can rely on ourselves. Not doing it generates the opposite effect. Selling a book written by an AI app won’t teach you anything you’d have to learn if you had written the book yourself, and any recognition and appreciation you’ll receive will feel like getting complimented for our beauty on a photo with filters. We know it’s not us. And secondly, is performance and speed really the only things that matter to us? I’m sure it’s not, but they surely are catchy and addictive.
So, let’s sum them up: we have an innate drive to shortening processes to achieve the same thing with less effort and saving time. Furthermore, we have more and more powerful tools that allow us to favor this innate drive. And we should know it by now: human beings are easily corrupted by the ease of access to flashy things.
Now that we know all this, where do we stand? I can’t help but be more and more convinced that there’s only one thing and one thing only that can counterbalance these aspects: awareness. Awareness will never tell you what to do or what not to do. It will give you tools to know why and what you're actually doing. You can be aware that something ain’t that positive and still carrying on: yet you’ll do it consciously. The point (at least for me) is not to conduct the life of a saint, who’s always right, blessed and perfect; it’s rather to be able to choose what can lead us to that feeling of peace and success. The pathway to that is absolutely paved with mistakes and wrongdoings. How could you walk if you never fall? How could you sing a perfectly tuned song if you didn’t accept the time you’ll take to improve your skills? How could you even know you’ve reached peace if you’ve never lived in the storm?
The incredible technologic advances we’ve been seeing over the past decades are probably nothing but a trailer of the unthinkable next achievements. Yet, make no mistake: all these advances have no purpose or mission. They just serve themselves, on a self-feeding spinning wheel to perform at a better and better level. This kind of progress (for which I’m not even comfortable calling it that) has long detached from a sense of serving a purpose.
Is all this a tragedy, is everything lost? Absolutely not. Let’s not be dramatic. Human beings thrive in crisis, they bloom through and because of tensions. Let’s make no mistake: life can’t exist without a sense of lack, wrong, unease because it’s that very sense that gets us moving. We’re always doing something aspiring for something else. It’s the western conception of a canned and everlasting state of bliss that has fried our brains and makes us feel so terrible when things are not working the way we’d like. A wholesome and successful life has nothing to do with the constant dopamine rush we get from the desperate clumsy attempts we make to reach that very distorted idea of success and happiness.
I’m totally fueled by the enthusiasm, provided by the awareness, that I am among those people who want to raise individual and collective awareness, counterbalancing a strong drive that’s inevitable. Knowing that by choosing the lesser of the evils, the shortest and fastest way, living someone else’s life will make me sick and will hinder the very journey to success itself, it all comes down to choices. When you see something, you can no longer unsee them.
To end this post, I couldn’t find a better analogy than Matrix Revolutions’ final battle scene. Agent Smith asks Neo: “Why do you persist? It’s inevitable” Almost defeated and with both worlds on the brink of destruction, Neo answers: “Because I choose to”. Some things are going to happen anyway. Yet, your own choices, possibly dictated by and constant expansion of awareness will have a tremendous impact. First, on your own life and second on anyone else who’ll cross your path, even for a moment.
Live. Be Aware. Choose. Be Successful.
