Achievement

When you watch an award show like the Oscars, there are individual and group awards given out to actors and production for the creative works they contributed to, from best actor, best picture, best original score, best visual effects, etc, in total there are 24 categories using the Oscars as an example. The Academy Awards also occasionally give out honorary awards not part of these 24, the one I find most interesting is the Lifetime Achievement award which is an award that honours the actor's entire career rather than a specific role.

The reason I find this award interesting isn't because I have a vested interest in any particular actor, on the industry more broadly, but rather the concept of rewarding a lifetime of work as a concept. When you ask the question, what has a person achieved in their lifetime, the answers you get will vary quite a bit, informed primarily by the aspirations and the priorities of those you ask. Those who are career-oriented for instance will usually answer the question by first identifying the field a person worked in and what they contributed to that field.

For those that are motivated by finance and economics, their definition of achievement will revolve around net worth and how much wealth an individual manages to amass in the course of their lifetime, but what if you don't care about either?

This question touches on the notion of aspiration more broadly, something which I have written about at length in the past. In a nutshell my own perspective on aspiration has been that I personally have no real aspirations in life other than to be happy in the moment. Whilst aspirations are an internal perspective, the notion of achievement is for the most part an external perspective because it usually requires some form of recognition to validate the sense of accomplishment.

I am aware that this concept teeters on the edge of defining your self-worth based on others' opinions of you and I am aware of how toxic that viewpoint is, and for what it's worth I don't think what other people think you have or haven't achieved really matters all that much. The reason I am focused on this concept right now however is related more to the notion of normalcy, as much as I hate the word "normal" there is a practical use for it at times, at least in the mathematical sense of normalcy and standard deviation from it.

When we reflect on our lives and consider what we feel we have achieved, it's inevitable that our view of those achievements will be biased by the perceived merit of those achievements. Taking a moment to indulge in the judgement of others however, in this case for objective reasons not for discrimination or prejudice, the question becomes a lot more sober, namely, what do people actually achieve in life? Specifically, "normal" people as opposed to celebrities or public figures and those of note within a given field.

The obvious answers that follow are love, money, happiness, and career oriented depending on the individual and their personality. For love the goal is inexorably marriage and if you are inclined then children to follow. For money it becomes financial stability, but few go beyond the point of having little concern for their financial decision making, to a point of abundance. Career often intertwines with money and deals with progression and promotion, but again most people reach a point of comfort where their basic needs are met and don't actively push to go beyond.

Happiness is difficult to quantify for the simple reason that it can mean so many different things to different people and can even mean different things to the same person at different times. There is no universal metric that can be applied to quantify happiness as a variable.

If you have no interest in any of these things however, most people run aground trying to define your achievement. If you never get married, don't have children, have no desire to own property or amass wealth, and have a job that pays the bills and nothing more or another source of income to pay them, what's left?

Affluence is what some people turn to, luxury goods, foods, drinks, cars, and other material possessions, expensive holidays and travelling around the world as a means to find fulfilment but if you pursue these things what do you achieve in the process? Happiness in the moment, with memories after the fact, but is that enough to sustain a lifetime?

The idea of giving someone a lifetime achievement award is tied to the body of work that can be cited to demonstrate what they have spent their life working towards but if happiness was your driver throughout life, how do you demonstrate that? With photos and videos, shared memories, social media posts et al? That realisation turns the entire concept of Instagram into something incredibly depressing, it was already skewed by the idea that people exaggerate their lives through it to make it look better to others but if you're doing that to make yourself feel better about how you feel about your life yourself, that gets incredibly dark.

I have written before about the idea that most peoples' lives exist on rails and that the symbolic nature of the Matrix is quite real in a figurative sense, that many people increasingly find themselves outside of that Matrix looking in, living a life that is no longer on rails which can be liberating but can also be debilitating because the functions of society are built around that model and participation in it predicates your ability to navigate society more broadly. You can realise the reality that money as a concept is a system of control and that commodity linked liquidity was long ago abandoned with real wealth created through debt today but that doesn't make you rich to understand, if anything it makes you realise you can't make money without losing it, the only way to become rich is to burden someone else with debt and if you want to argue against that point I'd ask you to expand your Sociological imagination and consider the impact of the wealth you amass and where it actually comes from.