IF SUCCESS IS A LADDER, JUST HOW MANY OF US CAN FIT ON IT TOGETHER?

It’s clear to many that there is a problem with making the acquisition of stuff and money the meaning of success and tying that to our self-worth as people.

People are already inherently worthy of love and human dignity. But if we are told from early on that we are not, and that we must earn it by earning more money and more than others do. Then we all tend to go through life in with some kind of anxiety that we are on the verge of failure not being good enough.

People already have a natural desire to feel worthy, to feel appreciated, and admired by others. Most men also tie our self-worth and desirability to the opposite sex to how much we make and succeed in life and that drive to be desirable to women is a very primal one.

Having enough to be desirable is a powerful motivating factor in how we structure our society.

So here’s the problem with this. Some people end up out of advantages gained by privileges of where they are born, or by being born into a certain class, a wealthy family, and into whatever race is in power and they for the most part end up succeeding far beyond everyone else.

Some manage to make it up the proverbial ladder to success and many of those people find that when they get there, wherever they thought "there" was they are still unhappy and unfulfilled. There is typically just a little bit more money than they have now regardless of where they start, everyone thinks happiness is having just a bit more.

We are told we need a newer, faster car to be happy and admired. We need a bigger home with a much bigger television set in every room. We need sparkling diamonds around the necks of those we love so they’ll really know we love them. We must work harder and harder to get more and more!

But beyond having our basic needs met to live a healthy life, earning or acquiring more stuff doesn’t bring real lasting and meaningful happiness. It’s not how high we climb the ladder at all that matters in fact. It’s who we make the journey with.

But we just keep working harder and longer hours, foregoing our vacation time if we get any as not to see our jobs replaced by others further down the ladder trying to push onto our rung. But we are all caught in place on this nonexistent ladder aren’t we?

People sense things are not getting better for most of us in fact if we are not in the top couple percentile of the wealthiest members of our country we may well be slipping down that ladder we are desperately climbing together.

That is why it’s time to think about how we look at and define success. Getting more money to buy more things to buy newer bigger things each year and move to a bigger home in a nicer neighborhood and drive there in a fancier car is not a healthy measure of being a successful person. It is not a successful path for building happy families or communities either.

We are all very busy climbing that "ladder" we grew up believing was the ladder leading us to a golden ring at the top that would make us happy.

The problem is many of us can’t find the ladder at all as getting a higher education has become too expensive and good paying unionized trade factory jobs have been shipped offshore where the pay is lower and workplace safety regulations don’t exist to protect the workers.

We all have very little of what economists call economic mobility, the ability to improve our financial lot in life anymore. So we are all pretty much stuck standing on the darn ladder looking up, looking down, and wondering what it’s all about. We all understand things have gone wrong, horribly wrong! People are fed up with our lack of progress and low voter turnout worldwide is one outcome of that.

So we are told what we need to do is embrace something called austerity and do with less so we will feel richer because they tell us there’s no longer enough for all of us. We have to “tighten our belts” they say and “pull ourselves up by our bootstraps”.

AUSTERITY IS THE WORKING

CLASS AND POOR HAVING TO PAY

FOR THE MISTAKES OF THE RICH.

They say we can grow by cutting, which on its face doesn’t make any sense. When we look at the results of their austerity measures we see a contraction of our economies, less jobs, and more human suffering. In fact the only thing that grew were the incomes of the top one percent wealthiest people around the world and the top stock holders of corporate shares.

When the people at the top, in government and big business by the way too often they are one and the same, when they lose track of what life is really worth then people get hurt. People go without the basic things in life because we are being measured in terms of worker productivity instead of human dignity, health and happiness.

Over sixteen million American children go to bed each night food insecure and living under the poverty line. And we are one of the richest nations in the entire world. Other nations who are far less fortunate have a much greater poverty rate and greater numbers of people suffering and that suffering is not unrelated to our massive appetite for more.

Can we just agree that before we produce more wealth for the people at the top, the rest of us make sure all of our families have food, shelter, clean drinking water, sanitation and affordable healthcare?

It’s great that we all want to have the next version of smarter more brilliant phone. Technology sure is helpful, I think most would agree. However we should all be aware that people work in the mines in South Africa and West Africa to get resources needed to make our cell phones components, and to mine diamonds to prove our love for our partners. These resources often fuel some of the most brutal conflicts resulting in millions of lost lives.

Let’s question the idea that more is always a good thing. Maybe we can question the idea that it's best to tell people that we should aspire to have more money than we could ever spend in our lifetimes so someday we can live in the biggest mansion ever built, driving the fastest most expensive car, and walk around with the largest sparkling diamonds.

I want to question this because somehow in the rush for more too many of us can't get up that ladder to simply get enough. I think we should take care of that.

Most of us around the world want pretty near the same thing. We want to be happy. We want to live in peace. We want to be free.

The researchers who have studied happiness have found that happiness is most closely tied to the degree to which people are connected to a network of supportive friends and loved ones, in other words a community. They have found that people who have work that they find to be personally meaningful are self-report as being the happiest.

It’s not the people who own the most things or control others or influence world markets or world opinions that are the happiest, it is people who choose to connect themselves to the world. People who spend time with those they love and engaging in activities that contribute to something beyond themselves are happier and healthier people. So if we want to be happy let’s work together to build healthier connections, healthier families and healthier communities!

This book was written by Joseph Segal a web developer from California who creates websites for social entrepreneurs and others building their dreams.

It’s intended to start a conversation about reframing how we look at success so we can move towards economic and other systems that promote greater health, more broadly based prosperity and a happy world to share together.

If you would like to learn more about Joseph Segal please visit JosephSegal.com where you’ll find more of his work and a new online shopping experience featuring books and products that promote health, love, happiness and prosperity.