Don’t be the Fly

Have you ever watched a fly trying to get out of a window? It repeatedly bashes itself into the same spot over and over again, never getting any closer to its goal, yet on it goes. Drawn by the light, it charges head first toward its goal without any idea why it is constantly failing to reach what it wants. To the fly, outside is success, and it knows that is what it wants so it blindly flies forward repeatedly only to be knocked back by some invisible force beyond its comprehension. You stare at the fly and laugh, thinking how pathetic it is that the fly can’t stop and see the solution to its problem is less than a foot away where the window is cracked open. The fly doesn’t have the ability to stop and comprehend a better solution, it sees what it wants and mindlessly chases this goal instead of sitting back and discovering a better way. The tragedy here isn’t the fly, because it has no ability to do otherwise. The tragedy is the human who laughs at the fly yet does the same thing in their life, even though they have the cognitive capacity to do better. We charge toward the light that is success, smashing ourselves into invisible barriers, instead of sitting back for one second to see the answer that lies in front of us.

If asked, most people would say they wish to be successful, but that term is so wildly subjective it could mean a myriad of different things. One person might consider having a family to be the greatest success imaginable, another might want to be rich and famous, while another may just consider living another year with their medical condition to be the grandest success they could ever hope for. So if the definition of “success” varies so wildly, what is it that people are after? In every case, success is merely a word that entails the achievement of a state that brings happiness to ones life. Some attach their happiness to success in their professional life, some to their personal life, and some to just merely being alive. Whatever the case, we are all searching for the same thing, true happiness, and we blindly charge forward again and again, thinking that if we hit that invisible barrier hard enough, one day it will crack and we will get what we want.

A poll done by the The Research Intelligence Group (TRiG) in 58 countries around the world showed that 53 percent of the world consider themselves to be “happy” while 13 percent claim to be “unhappy”. In the US, the happy percentage is the same but the “unhappy” group grew to 20 percent. What I found to be most interesting though is that there was more of a correlation between being in the top economic percentage within your own society and being happy than there was for being in the top economic class overall. What this means is that it isn’t being wealthy compared to humanity as a whole, but being wealthy in comparison to those within your own society/nationality. Why is this important? Because it shows the importance of perception when it comes to deriving happiness from material success. Someone that might be considered poor or just average in the US derives happiness from their wealth because when they look directly around their own society, they see themselves as successful. With the massive amount of wealth in the US, the bar for “successful” is raised much higher, making obtaining happiness from your perceived success that much more difficult. After basic needs are met, the only further sense of “happiness” you can derive from material gain is your built in feeling of superiority to those around you, the sense that you have done better, or that you are better, than your peers.

When we discover that happiness can be derived by an infinite scope of “success” and that even something so tangible as material success is also based on your perception, we can start to realize that we determine our own happiness. For the most part, we also determine when we want to call ourselves successful! If you don’t believe you will be a success until you are a millionaire, you may drive yourself so hard that you will achieve that incredible milestone, but you may also spend your life hating yourself for not reaching such a hefty goal and neglecting all the other things there are to enjoy in life. If instead you just decided that being successful was making enough to support your family and send your kids to school, you might have already reached that goal, and now instead of grinding away in pursuit of those six zeroes you can just be happy and spend time with a family that will love you so much more for spending your time with them. Success and happiness are relative, like so many things in life they are based on choices you make in the ever present moment.

When it comes to the idea of success and happiness, that bright light we are all drawn to, too many of us just charge forward mindlessly. We get an idea of what success is, or what we think will make us happy, and we don’t stop slamming ourselves into an imperceptible wall in our pursuit. Don’t be a stupid fly, smashing yourself repeatedly for a perceived goal and wasting your life with that constantly nagging feeling that you’re not good enough. Take a moment to sit back and think about what actually makes you happy. What do you truly want in your life and how can you achieve that goal? Sometimes we can’t see how stupidly we have been pursuing something that would never of made us happy even if we somehow broke through that barrier. Sometimes we are chasing something that will never happen and continue to subject ourselves to a life of misery in the vain attempt of achieving that goal. When we take a second to see what it is we truly want, what it is we were meant to do, we have outgrown the fly like mentality and suddenly all there is in front of us is an open window and a clear path forward.