The World Doesn’t Need More Successful People

BY SOFO ARCHON

This is the transcript of a spontaneous talk.

The world does not need more “successful” people.

Just think of what success means in our culture. It means amassing money and material possessions in order to prove your worth to society. In other words, it means being great at competing and winning over others. For that is what is required by our socio-economic system, for one to find success. It also means contributing to the destruction of the planet. For amassing material possessions requires the over extraction of Earth’s resources.

The world does not need that. The world needs healing. The world needs harmony. It needs peace. The world needs people who are kind, compassionate, caring, not “successful.” The world needs people who question the status quo. People who are willing to rebel against normalcy. People who are thoughtful, responsible. People who want to see the planet and our society heal from all the injuries that we have inflicted upon them. It needs people who are creative, who want to help enrich the beauty of this world. It needs people who want to see more collaboration and sharing, instead of competition and hoarding.

That’s what the world truly needs. Yet our culture is telling us otherwise. It is telling us that to be successful means to think only about ourselves. To improve our lives at the expense of the lives of other people and the countless beings that we share this planet with. But by doing that, we don’t improve our lives even. We worsen our lives. For we are worsening the conditions of the very world that we are living in.

The world needs people who care about the world. And by caring about the world, they’re also caring about themselves. And perhaps you are one of those people. So like I did, perhaps you also need to reconsider the notion of “success” and try your best to live in a way that contributes to the enrichment of the world, not its destruction.