Ambition and success mean different things to different people, often times that means they want a new car, a big house, tons of friends, but do they think of where those ideas come from? OK now the other direction, failure, living on a street corner, haven't showered in a month, and perhaps alcoholism causes people to think that whatever that person did to be there is usually their own fault, and the reason i'm driving by in a Mercedes is all my doing. These are some of the things Alain de Botton argues to us, that both of these situations are much deeper than we might initially think. Alain de Botton argues to us, that these ideas of success are often not our own, and our thoughts of self determinism are sometimes misconstrued. For example Alain talks to us about how we get our ideas of success often from marketing, buy a nice car, because it'll make you happy and get you a hot girlfriend; but Alain argues that, " if you see someone with a Ferrari, assume they are vulnerable and in need of love & sympathy, rather than contempt or greed." Because the feeling of needing that sports car is often the root of their possible unhappiness. Alain also argues that our lack of caste system, has now made a new age of self determinism extremely present in the way we look at people. We assume that if someone is successful (whatever that means to you) they deserve that success, but that also means that when we look at people less fortunate, we assume that they deserve what they got; for example in the middle ages they called the homeless the, "Less fortunate" but now they are are often thought of as "losers". And this is where tragedy comes in, Alain states that if we look at these less fortunate individuals with the guise of tragedy, we can have a more complete and sympathetic world view, because not everything is their fault, and this world is not a perfect meritocracy. Alain uses the fact that the suicide rates within these developed individualistic societies are much higher than the opposite, and claims that is the case because people believe that the reason they failed is because they deserved to fail. When in fact if we realized that the world will never be a perfect meritocracy, and that our failures are not just that, failure, but a way to learn we can help change things around. Everyone has failures, from the smartest mathematician, to Oprah (OK maybe not Oprah), to succeed everywhere in life is not feasible and so we should focus on learning what success means to us. Because "it feels bad to fail to achieve success, but much worse to achieve it and realize it wasn’t really what you wanted."
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Logan Smith
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