Failure and Discontent

Our era is perverse in passing off the exception as the rule...The likelihood of reaching the pinnacle of capitalist society today is only marginally better than were the chances of being accepted into the French nobility four centuries ago, though at least an aristocratic age was franker, and therefore kinder, about the odds. It did not … cruelly equate an ordinary life with a failed one.

Alain de Botton, The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work (thanks to John Self of the blog Asylum, in whose review I spotted this quotation)

In America, not least because our media enables it, anything less than spectacular success is accounted as failure -- and, of course, spectacular success itself can be and often is redefined as failure in another way (see: Michael Jackson, Jeffrey Skilling; see even: poor Jennifer Aniston, unlucky in love). As a society we are completely obsessed by failure, and constantly looking for signs for it. Everyone is continually being reviewed and assessed, formally or informally, on their educational, financial, professional, even emotional and sexual attainments (or lack thereof). There is no escape from this for a moment, except to the extent that one can find the "peace within" -- and the general thrust of the outer world we all have to inhabit makes that peace frustratingly difficult to achieve, although definitely worth the pursuit. Take it as axiomatic that no force in society -- marketers are an especially egregious example -- wants you to be happy or content; you would be no use to them that way. Only because you feel yourself a failure will you continue to try to purchase success.