Exploring life meaning beyond money
When your aim in life is no longer to simply 'get rich'.
Recently I asked you what alternative markers of success you’re exploring in your personal lives, I’ll be sharing some of your stories throughout this article for inspiration.
We live in a world of overproduction and overconsumption. And the more we consume, the more the planet suffers. Yet consumption is hailed as the key to keeping our economies flourishing. Thankfully, we are beginning to consider whether we should be pursuing growth at all.
This isn’t an article about degrowth, so I’m not going to tell you that GDP was not designed to assess the well-being of a society yet economists still treat it as an all-encompassing measure, or the fact that overconsumption is suffocating our planet, or how indigenous communities have thrived millennia without expanding economies.
Instead, I’d like to talk about our societal definers of success. Westernised success is mostly associated with wealth, power, and position, emphasise on wealth, as with the growing world of influencers and social media, this seems to be what most people are aiming for. We all want to get that promotion, buy more stuff, and get rich.
I am not immune to this myself. I’ve written a whole article about our obsession with getting rich, and my reflections on how I’ve been trying to break this age-old paradigm inside of me. Doing so, I’ve realised I have been looking for new goals to aim for, new ways to assess my efforts and measure my successes. Then recently, I came across this quote in a newsletter:
“What if your markers of success were how well you slept at night? How many books you read? How easily you laughed? How much time you spent storytelling, feeling warm in the arms and homes of people you adore?" Damn.
In my ‘professional’ life, I work with businesses who are searching for unorthodox success markers–they’re no longer looking to sell as much stuff as possible to make as much money as possible. Instead, they’re exploring alternative growth curves and new ways to measure their progress.
Despite having this conversation over and over again with different kinds of people and organisations–and working on my own preconceptions around money and wealth–the concept of alternative successes is still something I’ve struggled with myself.
“I have a few different measures of success. While making enough to live off is of course essential, beyond that, making lots of money isn't the goal for me. I'd say the first one is achieving enough time and space to rest when I need to and enjoy a good quality of life. Another is to feel like I'm living my values and actively contributing to the kind of world I want to see. And I also see the cultivation and maintenance of connections and relationships as a key measure of success. No (wo)man is an island and community is the key to our collective thriving.” Rachel Baker
I’ve been a freelancer for just over 3 years now, and without performance reviews or managers to give me feedback on how I’m doing, I ended up basing my ‘success’ on how much money I’ve earned each month, each year.
“Have I made more freelancing or working a ‘real’ job?”
“Have I made more this year than the last?”
“Has the percentage increase of my earnings gone up more in the last year than it did the year before?”
None of these factors ever took into account how my mental health has improved now I no longer work under a god-awful boss, or how much my physical health has changed now I have spare time to exercise and cook real meals, or the fact I get to work to my own schedule, or that I can take days off when I need them, or how I get to work with people who share my philosophies or, or, or–the list goes on.
But no, I boiled all of these incredible things down to an arbitrary number. My biggest indicator of success was a salary competition with myself, which ignored so many of the reasons I went freelance in the first place. Talk about internalised capitalism!
“I feel that learning new skills that will benefit myself and my community are great goals. For me not academic qualifications but usable skills like growing herbs for medicine or learning to preserve food or how to offer a sharing circle for people. Putting my attention on learning seems a satisfying way to move away from acquisition. And that learning being something that's not just an academic badge that perpetuates the system.” - Kate Seren
These highly Westernised views of success aren’t just impacting those of us who live here, we’re also imposing these ideas onto other countries and expecting them to conform to our standards. The world is often divided between those who fit these imposed parameters of success and those who are perceived as a burden.
We are made to believe we need to ‘help’ others achieve our levels of success in life for them to be truly happy or content. We cannot fathom that someone may be happy to live with a lower wage, a smaller house, in multigenerational communities, or without the newest technology. This often doesn’t compute in minds that have been shaped by capitalist ideologies to want more more more.
Ayesha Khan from Cosmic Anarchy recently discussed how we are left chasing ’independence’ how our purpose for living is seen, under our capitalist society, to work and make money, how: “Many of us spend a good chunk of our day in isolation, doing tasks that support a profit-driven, exploitative institution far more than they directly aid a living being that we intimately know and care about. We’ve been so removed from directly supporting another being’s survival so it makes sense if many of us are left wondering ‘what is the point?’” Continuing on to point out that ‘[w]e’re often left desperately searching for meaning in our jobs or in something else that we can do in isolation but ultimately–that is unsustainable.”
We’ve been alienated from our own ability to create meaning in this world. After being told by everything around us that our work–and the money we receive from it–is where we should derive meaning in our lives.
We judge how our life is going by how much money we make–not by our personal achievements, our connections with others, or even our happiness levels. We even judge others–their worth–on how much money they make too–assuming just because someone is rich that they are intelligent or they are good.
“I feel successful when I learn about the plant and animal species around me. Particularly when I am familiar with a species and can identify it without help. 😊” Sarah
Aside from the more mild successes–that’s not to say we can’t or shouldn’t measure our life by how easily we laughed, or by how well we slept–I have also been looking for meaning in more traditionally competitive fields.
I feel blocked if I don’t create, if I take in too much information and don’t produce a similar amount I feel out of balance, but I am trying to create in gentler ways. I will write, draw, paint, crochet, and sew without caring if people will look at my creations, spend money on my creations, or find value in my creations. I will do this because I find inherent life meaning, value, and satisfaction in doing so.
I will play sports, I will run, I will do yoga, not to compete, to win, or to dominate, but because it feels good in my body, because I enjoy doing it, and because it gives me a sense of satisfaction, of completion, of achievement.
Maybe this year I will measure my success on how many meaningful conversations, how many afternoons spent reading in the sun, or how many delicious dinners I have cooked in my spare time. Maybe I will find contentment in the mere act of doing something, of completing something, just for my own satisfaction.
P.S. If you enjoy my writing, you can buy me a coffee to fuel my work.
In a similar vein, I wrote a lil something for
recently, all about how the outdated 9-5 work system is a reflection of a system built for men, by men - and how adapting to natural cycles would be a pretty anti-capitalist thing to do. Plus the lovely Cass wrote about the struggles to picture utopia during the crises we find ourselves in.
Inspirations:
Being Pagan: A Guide To Re-Enchant Your Life
Rituals (with your homies) make life worth living
As an actor, I used to say that I couldn't afford to have a moral backbone. Or as another financially desperate actor told me, "I'd play the dog food in a dog food commercial." That Faustian deal is part of why the studios keep telling WGA and SAG members we should be grateful we even get to participate in the entertainment industry (making billionaires more money). Now that I'm no longer pursuing this kind of work, I feel like the true marker of success is not having to make any ethical compromises. No more showing up on set and having a costume with leather or fur, even though I ask for them not to be (which only makes me look difficult -- I mean, shouldn't I just be grateful for the opportunity?). No more worrying about working with someone with a less than savory reputation -- I don't have to please agents or managers. No more using my face to hawk other people's stuff -- my body is not a billboard. But I do not blame anyone who makes those choices. Without a social safety net, even the best trained and most talented creatives have to make a living somehow, and that's usually through commercial endeavors. All because our bank accounts define our worth. Sheesh.
love the line about feeling out of balance when you don't create as much as you're consuming - we're not just over consuming materials, it's information too, and that can be just as addicting! ty for including that it's a great reminder