阿蘭·德波頓
英國作家
我們想要的不是物質(zhì)，而是背后的情感反饋，這賦予奢侈品一個嶄新的意義。下次你看到那些開著法拉利跑車的人，你不要想“這個人很貪婪”，而是“這是一個無比脆弱、急需愛的人”，也就是說，同情他們，不要鄙視他們。
這就是為什么我們?nèi)绱嗽诤跏聵I(yè)和成就，以及看重金錢和物質(zhì)的原因。我們時常被告知我們處在一個物質(zhì)掛帥的時代，我們都是貪婪的人。我并不認(rèn)為我們特別看重物質(zhì)，而是活在一個物質(zhì)能帶來大量情感反饋的時代。
不一定是你我的母親，而是一個理想母親的想象，一個永遠(yuǎn)義無反顧的愛你，不在乎你是否功成名就的人，不幸地，大部分世人都不懷有這種母愛，大部分世人決定要花費多少時間，給于多少愛，不一定是浪漫的那種愛，雖然那也包括在內(nèi)，世人所愿意給我們的關(guān)愛、尊重，取決于我們的社會地位。
勢利鬼的另一個極端，是你的母親。
今日最主要的勢利，就是對職業(yè)的勢利。你在派對中不用一分鐘就能體會到，當(dāng)你被問到這個21世紀(jì)初，最有代表性的問題：你是做什么的？你的答案將會決定對方接下來的反應(yīng)，對方可能對你在場感到榮幸，或是開始看表，然后想個借口離開。
對那些來訪牛津大學(xué)的外國友人，我有一個壞消息，這里的人都很勢利。有時候，英國以外的人會想象，勢利是英國人特有的個性，來自那些鄉(xiāng)間別墅和頭銜爵位。壞消息是，并不只是這樣，勢利是一個全球性的問題，我們是個全球性的組織，這是個全球性的問題，它確實存在。勢利是什么？，勢利是以一小部分的你，來判別你的全部價值，那就是勢利。
現(xiàn)在或許比以前更容易過上好生活，但卻比以前更難保持冷靜，或不為事業(yè)感到焦慮。今天我想要檢視，我們對事業(yè)感到焦慮的一些原因，為何我們會變成事業(yè)焦慮的囚徒。不時抱頭痛哭，折磨人的因素之一是，我們身邊的那些勢利鬼。
我提出這件事是因為，我認(rèn)為不只有我這么感覺。你可能不這么認(rèn)為，但我感覺我們活在一個充滿事業(yè)恐慌的時代，就在我們認(rèn)為我們已經(jīng)理解我們的人生和事業(yè)時，真實便來恐嚇我們。
我經(jīng)常對事業(yè)感到恐慌，周日下午，晚霞灑滿天空，我的理想和現(xiàn)實的差距卻是這樣殘酷，令我沮喪的只想抱頭痛哭。
The nightmare thought is that frightening people is the best way to get work out of them, and that somehow the crueler the environment, the more people will rise to the challenge. You want to think, who would you like as your ideal dad? And your ideal dad is somebody who is tough but gentle. And it's a very hard line to make. We need fathers, as it were, the exemplary father figures in society, avoiding the two extremes, which is the authoritarian disciplinarian on the one hand, and on the other, the lax, no-rules option.
I think it's merely the randomness of the winning and losing process that I want to stress, because the emphasis nowadays is so much on the justice of everything, and politicians always talk about justice. Now I'm a firm believer in justice, I just think that it's impossible. So we should do everything we can to pursue it, but we should always remember that whoever is facing us, whatever has happened in their lives, there will be a strong element of the haphazard. That's what I'm trying to leave room for; otherwise, it can get quite claustrophobic.
So, I'm going to end it there. But what I really want to stress is: by all means, success, yes. But let's accept the strangeness of some of our ideas. Let's probe away at our notions of success. Let's make sure our ideas of success are truly our own.
So what I want to argue for is not that we should give up on our ideas of success, but we should make sure that they are our own. We should focus in on our ideas, and make sure that we own them; that we are truly the authors of our own ambitions. Because it's bad enough not getting what you want, but it's even worse to have an idea of what it is you want, and find out, at the end of the journey, that it isn't, in fact, what you wanted all along.
And we also suck in messages from everything from the television, to advertising, to marketing, etc. These are hugely powerful forces that define what we want and how we view ourselves. When we're told that banking is a very respectable profession, a lot of us want to go into banking. When banking is no longer so respectable, we lose interest in banking. We are highly open to suggestion.
And the thing about a successful life is that a lot of the time, our ideas of what it would mean to live successfully are not our own. They're sucked in from other people; chiefly, if you're a man, your father, and if you're a woman, your mother. Psychoanalysis has been drumming home this message for about 80 years. No one's quite listening hard enough, but I very much believe it's true.
Here's an insight that I've had about success: You can't be successful at everything. We hear a lot of talk about work-life balance. Nonsense. You can't have it all. You can't. So any vision of success has to admit what it's losing out on, where the element of loss is. And I think any wise life will accept, as I say, that there is going to be an element where we're not succeeding.
What I think I've been talking about really is success and failure. And one of the interesting things about success is that we think we know what it means. If I said that there's somebody behind the screen who's very successful, certain ideas would immediately come to mind. You'd think that person might have made a lot of money, achieved renown in some field. My own theory of success -- I'm somebody who's very interested in success, I really want to be successful, always thinking, how can I be more successful? But as I get older, I'm also very nuanced about what that word "success" might mean.
Not for the sake of our health, though it's often presented that way, but because it's an escape from the human anthill. It's an escape from our own competition, and our own dramas. And that's why ween joy looking at glaciers and oceans, and contemplating the Earth from outside its perimeters, etc. We like to feel in contact with something that is non-human, and that is so deeply important to us.
我們的英雄是人類，這是一個嶄新的情況。歷史中大部分的社會重心都是敬拜一位人類以外的靈體，神，自然力、宇宙，總之是人類以外的什么。我們逐漸失去了這種習(xí)慣，我想這也是我們越來越被大自然吸引的原因。
Our heroes are human heroes. That's a very new situation. Most other societies have had, right at their center, the worship of something transcendent: a god, a spirit, a natural force, the universe, whatever it is -- something else that is being worshiped. We've slightly lost the habit of doing that, which is, I think, why we're particularly drawn to nature.
The other thing about modern society and why it causes this anxiety, is that we have nothing at its center that is non-human. We are the first society to be living in a world where we don't worship anything other than ourselves. We think very highly of ourselves, and so we should; we've put people on the Moon, done all sorts of extraordinary things. And so we tend to worship ourselves.