the need to be successful
I’m having more and more conversations with people who have an “or else” relationship with their own success.
Why do you need to be successful? I ask them.
Well I don’t need to be, they usually say. I just want to be great.
Okay, I say. And what happens if you’re not great?
Oh. Then I’ll hate myself.
Ah.
It’s a painful thing for them. It’s like a bad love affair. At times it’s exhilarating, this pursuit of greatness. It feels beautiful, worthy, right. But it sucks the life out of them.
It’s Jung’s idea of a provisional life. Life is lived in anticipation of future greatness. One day, it’ll all be worth it. But they’re not there yet. And so they can’t relax.
We might say, for the provisional person, that success is a prerequisite to fully living a life. Greatness is the permission slip to actually enjoy living.
But such a person would probably disagree with that. “I enjoy pursuing greatness!” they protest. “After all, what else is there?” It’s the same with the lover caught in a bad affair: “but I can’t imagine my life without him!” Yes, and therein lies the problem.
If the pursuit of future greatness is your main source of meaning in your life… well, first of all, you can’t let it go. You can’t stop. You can’t slip up, not really. You must pursue, always pursue, always strive, improve, reach, dream…
You must always be earning. Earning what? Your future life, your real life. For such a person, the present isn’t real: it’s a staging ground for their potential.
It’s an inversion of reality. In truth, the present is all that’s real; the future is an abstraction. The provisional person reverses this.
In doing so, they sacrifice their present self: they repress their imperfections, doubts, yearnings. They cut off anything that threatens their future. Thus they are often at war with themselves, with the accompanying vicious self criticism.
Will they win this war? Probably not. Reality tends to win out, on a long enough time scale. That doesn’t mean that a beautiful future is impossible. But when it arrives, it will be in the shape of a beautiful present. At that point, the skill will be in appreciating and enjoying the present. And that is exactly the skill that the provisional person forgets to learn…
With love & appreciation,
Scott
Been thinking a lot about this recently, in particular about how everybody seems to be talking about the provisional life in terms of puer aeternis possession, but I never see this opposite side being discussed -- which I see as more aligned with the senex and equally problematic. Of course, it is just the different side of the same coin, and on both extremes people live provisionally. It's cool to think about this inverse where instead of some peter pan syndrome, you still suffocate yourself, but in a different way, by means of an over-rigid inner figure that doesn't have the wisdom to carry its own convictions.
These people refer to an inner monologue more often than a inner dialogue.. they don't realize they are the ones who give the rottenly self-critical voice any authority. Constantly searching for something or someone to tell them what they SHOULD do, as if there is always a single correct answer.
Hillman's writing on this in the puer papers is great, in case you haven't seen it already.