On Success: A Brief and perhaps Philosophically random Stream of consciousness

We often speak about success as if it was something objective, or better, we often don't speak about it but it is where all our energies are longing towards. We assume success as if it was a place in the world one could point to and say: there, that is where I am going. And yet philosophy has almost always undermined this certainty. From its very beginning, it has insisted that what we call a “good life” is never given by nature, but shaped by history, culture, power, and desire.

Aristotle already warned that wealth, status, and recognition could never be success in themselves, only instruments to reach a good life. They belong to the order of means, not ends. The question, for him, was not what we achieve, but what kind of life allows a human being to flourish. Not to accumulate, but to live well.

Anthropology and social theory extended this intuition: every society produces its own image of success, and then educates its members to desire it.

In the 1990s I was a kid and success still largely belonged to institutions. Stability. Continuity. A recognizable place inside economic and social structures. The ideal subject was integrated, reliable, progressing. My family, for a very long period of time, represented this idea of success even if it was withing the working class spectrum: success was discipline, security and legitimacy.

In the early 2000s, when I was a teenager the ideal began to shift. As Michel Foucault foresaw, power no longer operated mainly through prohibition, but through self-fashioning. We were invited to become entrepreneurs of ourselves. Success turned into a personal project. Life into a portfolio. To be successful meant not only to work, but to constantly construct who one was.

By the 2010s, on my young adult years, and when I was putting the seeds of the person I wanted to be one day, success became inseparable from visibility. To exist was to circulate one's image and life. To succeed was to be seen, t be liked to be followed (mainly online). Metrics slowly replaced meanings. We were no longer mainly controlled by rules and authority, but by the pressure to perform, and we ended up exploiting ourselves while calling it freedom.

In the years we are living right now, something else is quietly emerging. After exhaustion, ecological threat, and psychological saturation, success is increasingly filtered through the body. Through time. Through limits. One of the thinkers I happened to encounter recently called Zoë Helene also questions dominant models of success based on growth, mastery, and optimization. Her work points toward a more relational understanding of fulfilment, one rooted in interconnectedness, embodied presence, and the ability to be affected and shaped by the world and If I follow this perspective, I find Eastern philosophies to be a radical alternative to Western thought, and I am starting to like radical, more and more.

Daoism never defined success as ascent. It spoke instead of alignment. Of living in accordance with the Dao, the way things unfold when they are not forced. The wise is not the one who conquers, but the one who does not contend. Wu wei is often translated as “non-action,” but it is more precisely non-violent action: action that does not break the grain of life. In this view, success is not achievement, but unobstructed participation.

Buddhism goes further. It identifies craving itself as the root of suffering. From this perspective, many of our modern images of success are not solutions but symptoms. The endless reaching, optimizing, accumulating is not proof of vitality, but of misrecognition. The successful life, here, is not the life that grows, but the life that wakes up. Not the life that secures itself, but the life that sees through the illusion of what needs to be secured.

Zen traditions are even more radical and uncompromising. They speak of ordinary mind as the way. Real life is in chopping wood and carrying water. Life doesn't have a special state to attain. Success, in this sense, collapses as a category, completely. What remains is intimacy with what is. Presence without narrative. One may think that these traditions are naïve about suffering but in reality they are precise about it. They locate it not in the absence of achievement, but in the structure of grasping, in the system of longing.

Western philosophy, from Aristotle to Spinoza, from Nietzsche to Arendt, has spread also similar intuitions. But modern Western societies organized themselves around growth, mastery, and externalization. And so our dominant measures of success became visible, comparative, extractive.

Across corporate, academic, artistic, and family worlds, success is still largely asked in the same way:

• What have you built?

  
  

• What do you show?

  
  

• Where are you positioned?

But what if the right questions were:

• 
  

  How are you breathing inside your life?

  
  

• How much are you resisting what you are living?

  
  

• How much violence is required to maintain your way of being?

This is where, for me, the question of success has slowly moved.

Today, success no longer looks like a summit. It looks like a condition. Spinoza wrote that joy is the feeling of a life whose power to exist is increasing, not outwardly, but in its capacity to remain with itself without fragmentation. I experience it as coherence.

Success, for me, is more and more about whether my inner life and my outer life are in some kind of dialogue rather than war. About whether I am betraying myself daily, or accompanying myself. About whether, within the very limited tools this one life offers (one body, one family history, one fragile window of time and space) there is a sense of inhabiting life rather than escaping it.

Success shows itself less in what rises above life, and more in what allows me to stay inside it. In a basic sense of calm. In the quiet feeling that I am not constantly elsewhere than where I am. And I would like to be able to continue to work on this.

However, I want to remain awake to something that already shows in the word I chose to conclude the previous sentence "work". Because today’s society is still deeply engraved with the logic of achievement, even these paradigms of being here and now are never fully innocent. Even resonance, presence, and spirituality can be quietly absorbed into the same economy of performance. We see it in the race toward “wellness,” where meditation becomes a step-by-step accomplishment and inner life another project to optimize. We see it in the accumulation of titles and trainings, in the collecting of Reiki levels, ceremonies, breathwork experiences, certificates of ego dissolution, as if depth itself could be quantified, displayed, and ranked.

Often this becomes just another form of self-extraction, not so different from toxic positivity or the compulsive project of “healing oneself.” Instead of opening us back into relation, it can pull us further away from community and interdependence, encouraging the construction of ever more refined inner fortresses. The more self-contained, self-curated, and self-mastered one appears, the more one seems to “succeed.” In this economy, even spirituality risks becoming a competition of egos.

And yet, it is precisely here that the question of success begins to shift for me. Toward a feeling of fulfilment not as possession, but as rightness. Not as improvement, but as belonging. In the sense that I am not endlessly trying to extract something more from life, but learning how to consent to it.

And maybe, on a finite planet, in finite bodies, success slowly stops being about how much we can take from existence (and, let’s be political, from the Earth and from whatever minorities we encounter) and becomes more about how gently, lucidly, and truthfully we can belong to it.