They’d be indoctrinating us very early on, not in a wrong way or not in a conscious way, but that’s the message we get from the teachers, the principal, and parents often, that you are going to be a good worker. It’s more like a working message, you’re going to be a worker. But we also get the message, I remember in elementary school, they would tell us “You have to study hard, so you can get a good job.” Which is not necessarily a success message. Funny, but not so funny cultural pressure. They say that women are looking for success objects, and men are looking for sex objects. Also the pressure on men, that’s the only way they basically match in society. There’s always asking “Why aren’t you having children? Did you feel like you missed out? I don’t care if you’re the president of the international bank and multibillionaire, but you don’t have kids, what happened?” There’s a lot of that. It’s also looked upon even as women in this modern age, there’s this stigma around women pursuing success and not having children. Success, when I was younger, was defined in my family by getting married and having babies. But certainly in a cultural sense, in a community sense, we’re given mixed messages, we are told that success means having a lot of money, prestige, material, so forth. Rightly so because everyone has to define success for themselves. Success has many meanings to many people. Let’s start with defining what is success and how we measure it. Unconsciously, we’re getting that message that money is bad, success is bad. If you think about all the movies, they did research, 90% of the wealthy people in movies are portrayed as villains. That’s because it’s part of the culture, part of the religion, part of the socialization most of us go through.
There’s a lot of conflict between spiritual people being successful, that comes from that, whether you’re organized religion or spiritual but not religious, there’s a lot of that conflict, even if it’s not conscious. That’s a reference, of course, to the Gospel, which says “What does it profit a man if he should gain the whole world, but lose his soul?”
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