Success or fulfilment?

We live in a world where we are constantly called upon to evaluate, vote, and give thumbs up or thumbs down. With a simple gesture, we determine our position. In the same way, teachers and employers evaluate us. We are measured to establish our profile as learners or employees. The same goes for our popularity.

What is ultimately being measured? Our ability to attain a different position, a better or broader life, other responsibilities? Our commitment? Our character traits? Our belonging to a particular organisation? Our legitimacy in relation to that organisation?

Black Mirror, in its time, had already pointed to this frenzy to evaluate, presenting a dystopian vision of a world so lost in its human relationships that it had become commonplace to rate everyone on obscure or, worse, non-existent criteria.

Is it a question of measuring or determining success or personal achievement? What are the objectives of each?

Success has its dark side because if there is a winner, there is a loser. If there is support, there is opposition. If there is acceptance, there is rejection. If there is a decision by some, there is competition between oneself and others. It is a point of view, whether considered or arbitrary, with all the gradations that connect the extremes.

Fulfilment is of a different nature. There is indeed a goal to be fulfilled, but it concerns a previous state compared to a current state. Fulfilment highlights a journey with its winding paths, its unexpected events, its reversals. Rather than a stark opposition, it is an integration that touches on personal transformation. To refer to the philosopher Paul Ricoeur, fulfilment shows how two forms of identity, which we all possess, come together: selfhood, or that part of ourselves that is subject to change like waves on the surface, and sameness, that part of ourselves that remains, whatever happens on the surface, like an undercurrent. Fulfilment would then move away from a more or less reasoned, more or less relevant point of view to a deeper vision of our being.

And it is this undercurrent that unites beings in a meaningful relationship, beyond the divisions and ups and downs of the surface.