I had thought this went without saying, but it appears I must spell it out for the less attentive: I've come to expect nothing from this world. It was here long before I entered into it, and will be here long after I've departed. It owes neither me, nor the reader, anything of substance, and anyone who would believe otherwise is simply begging the heavens to humble them.
When I was an adolescent, I attended an elite private school for the privileged, before being admitted to a magnet school for the gifted. And many of my peers treated our new surroundings as their ticket to fame and fortune. They had been plucked out of failing southern schools, and the pressure placed upon them to succeed proved in many cases to be counterproductive, leading to both high stress and burnout.
As I had already come from a reasonably wealthy family though, and grown up with semi-celebrity status, I knew how empty and fruitless such goals were. My own hopes were less academic, and more social. In many ways the magnet school offered me less academically than the private school I had come from, but both students and teachers were infinitely more gracious, and thus far kinder to one another.
The truth of the matter is that on paper the magnet school did hold me back in many ways. Career-wise, it was a very poor choice, as I could easily have used the clout of my old school combined with my parents' wealth and influence to attend an Ivy League university.
But I graduated having made such a broad assortment of close friends, both ethnically and socioeconomically, that I became a far better person than the snooty and posh assortment of groomed sociopaths I had been plucked from the midst of. And so I left that high school with few regrets.
I'm mentioning this because we are living through another brief era of decadence in America. And the rules of life in such a world are that, the more you have, the more you are as a person. You are measured solely by your possessions and your bank account, all of which contribute to a single, solitary number at the bottom of a sheet of paper: your net worth.
I haven't just walked down that road. I was born on it. And setting aside the moral implications of such a hedonistic philosophy, the truth of the matter is that such logic could not be more flatly false. In fact, the more a person has, the less they are inside. I've seen it in my family, and I've seen it with my peers growing up. Those who place their trust in a number on a page, rather than in building human relationships, in the end receive their sour reward. You need only visit a hospice center for the elderly to confirm that fact.
So what I would say to those of you who have burned out on your journey to the top, and feel like failures, is that you have received the greater blessing, for you wavered, and were therefore only disciplined, while those of your compatriots who climbed corpses to reach a pinnacle of power, will in the end be destroyed.
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