Exit Code 0: The Illusionary Tale of Success
For as long as I can remember, I have been a person motivated by material success. I’ve always needed the best grades, the perfect friends, and the best stories to tell those around me as a means to ensuring my perception stays immaculate. I’ve held myself to impossibly high goals by disguising them as ideals, without realizing the implications of such a move. Hell, it’s even gotten to the point where, at points, I lead two distinct lifestyles — “professional” Tyler, who consistently totes around the perfect image, and “personal” Tyler, who still struggles to accept even the most basic parts of self.
To say that I’m on the road to changing this would be a blatant lie. I still commit myself to tens of hours of work a week, spread across so many distinct realms that I’m not quite sure where one job ends and the other begins. I’ve spread myself thin in the name of procuring all the accreditations imaginable, because for some odd reason, nothing ever seems to fulfill that itch to learn.
This, my friends, is the illusionary tale of success.
Success: a noun that describes “the accomplishment of an aim or purpose”, or “the attainment of fame, wealth, or social status.” Doesn’t it seem like we’ve butchered it into losing all its meaning? The longer I stare at this definition, something I hadn’t even pondered until tonight, the more I feel like this word has been bastardized and mutated into some ugly, foul measurement of a person.
Furthermore, why do we now hold success, a word that describes that accomplishment of goals, as a goal itself? How have we, as an intelligent species, managed to create a recursive Catch-22 of impossible goals and far-too-lofty ideals? At what point did success stop being an end result, and start being this impossible addendum to everything we pursue in life?
Take my field of study, computer science, for example; in C++, when we see an exit code of 0, or success, that means that, at the end of its operational lifespan, the program executed successfully and without fail. This is the meaning of success that we see in every definition — the code doesn’t actively or intelligently pursue success, though we might as programmers, but instead just runs and, if it runs into errors, it just stops and reports those.
In this case, success isn’t a virtue, it’s an expected result of all files just like it. This random C++ file isn’t more or less successful, it’s just successful. Simple, easy, intuitive.
Now let’s look to the broader field, or more specifically, the person behind the C++ file. If their code runs with all exit code 0s flashing across the board, they aren’t necessarily successful. No, because they didn’t code it the proper way, or they didn’t do it as fast as the next person, or they didn’t implement some ternary statement that looks cooler. Humans don’t get an exit code of 0. They get some twisted decimal value that approaches 0, but never quite gets there. We hide this abnormality behind a little thing known as motivation. We call the constant pursuit of pure 0 the motivation towards our success.
Isn’t that weird to think about? Something as smart as a computer has reasonably deduced that there is pure success and pure failure, yet we still make it out to be some sort of lofty ideal. At what point did we arrive to this conclusion, that we can’t ever have true success because someone always “does it better”, and when did that sad opinion become okay?
Why is it that, in the life of that same programmer, his ability to wake up, attend school all day, do various assignments across various disciplines, fit in his social time, and somehow sleep for a few hours a night doesn’t return an exit code of 0? Why is it that we’re always restricted to almost successful in everything we do?
I mean, is it really too much to want to wake up one day, head free of worries, just to see an exit code of 0 for once? Is it too much to want to be able to say that I’m applying for new internships, jobs, scholarships, et cetera, and have people say “good for you, you’re successful in what you do”? Apparently so; we give praise to people by telling them they’re going to be successful eventually, and that they are the next person in a very long queue to use their x amount of useful years on Earth to pursue success.
Success has become this ideal, something we may never quite reach, and the same hand pulling us away from that feeling of true success is feeding us the same motivational crap you see everyday on every social media platform. You’re not quite successful because you aren’t making passive income, or you aren’t buying into the latest craze, or you aren’t number one in the world at this one thing.
At what point are we able to look at ourselves, say that we’re proud of how successful we are, and have people say the same thing back? Who cares if it’s a rose-tinted point of view; call me soft, or a snowflake that needs his own special space, but I think that the real motivation is being able to say we’ve reached success in what we’ve done.
Success was never intended to be a spectrum of how right or how wrong what you’re doing is working out for you. The archaic definition of success states this clearly — “the good or bad outcome of an undertaking.” Why did this ever become archaic? Am I not allowed to feel a full feeling of success by waking up in the morning, without being told I’m being coddled by those around me? If success truly feeds into our motivation, why are we convinced that admitting success leads directly into stagnation?
This leads back into my introductory paragraph. In the last few weeks alone I have been under the most immense stress I have ever had the absolute displeasure of experiencing. I have stretched myself between full-time school, part-time work, overtime commitments, and whatever little sleep I can hold myself to nightly. I’ve accidentally split myself into a personal and professional image of myself, unsure which I am at points, and I’ve convinced myself that, in order to please this high ideal of success, I’ve got to always have my ducks in a row mentally, physically, and emotionally. I’ve taught myself to mask my purely basic goals behind a pursuit of ideals, a pursuit of goals, a pursuit of success.
The implications of this that I was mentioning? I’ve now done nothing but convinced myself that success is unattainable unless I present something to the world that, for once, can’t be weighed against any other indiscretion. Success isn’t getting 70s or 80s in my classes, it’s finishing top of my class so that I can’t be called subpar to some other measurement. Success isn’t finishing a development project that I find useful and exciting, it’s finding some revolutionary breakthrough that can’t be called obsolete the minute I share it. Success isn’t waking up in the morning, it’s living the entire day running at 100% efficiency. In a sense, I’ve done nothing but perpetuate the same theories that I’ve come to loathe.
This has caused me to, at points, become purely apathetic of what I can make of myself. Potential is nothing but a limiter and hindrance on progress is a mantra that I find myself repeating without any substance to back it up. The idea that professional Tyler isn’t perceived well socially, or that personal Tyler shouldn’t indulge in his hobbies and interests because they won’t be of any use to me later on? At points, I couldn’t care to challenge it.
The question I’ve been left with, then, is what to do to break out of that vicious cycle. I’ve been stuck in the mud, tires frantically spinning, and been purely okay with that. Stagnation and mediocrity have become a familiar face that I find myself happily associating with everyday, which in turn limits me from my “full success”, which feeds stagnation, so on and so forth. The fact that I wake up some mornings, wishing there was a magic pill to erase this feeling, to start over fresh, is sad but also incredibly enticing when it shouldn’t be.
What can I charge you with in closing, then? Well, about the same message that any person who perceives themselves as being in a state of objective mediocrity can supply: we’re all headed to the same ending anyways, so let success be what you deem your personal exit code 0. Don’t do what I’ve done, and waste your days wallowing away about “what-ifs” and “so whats”. Live your life the way you deem to be successful; remember, so long as you accomplish your aim or purpose, you’re meeting that definition already.
Find small victories in waking up in the morning? Continue that trend, whether your wake-up call is at 5 am or 10 am. Take pride in your 70s and 80s. Remind yourself daily that the indiscretions of yesterday aren’t the inhibitors of tomorrow. I know it may be weird to take this advice from someone still struggling with implementing all these ideas, but don’t let yourself fall into that rut of stagnation, of mediocrity, and of inevitable solitude.
Don’t feel like you need to be socially successful either. If your typical Friday night consists of staying at home writing like I am right now, then take pride in every keystroke you input or character you pen. If it involves going out and getting insanely drunk with your friends, then give yourself a pat on the back for every shot you take. Remember to thank yourself for the gifts that you’ve been given in the ability to freely choose and direct your own path, because we don’t all get that luxury.
As for me, I’m on the longest road to emotional recovery that I’ve ever been on. By at least attempting to convince myself of these facts that I shared with you above, I find success in every day. It’s an arduous task, finding internal solace, but if you beat me, your family, or your friends there, keep reminding them that they don’t need to aim for success, so long as they’ve reached their own interpretation of it.
In a word, don’t let the universe predetermine your path, when you’ve been given the conscious ability to forge your own.
