Her body aches from a night of fighting her way back to the shore of a place unknown. Partially blinded, handicapped. A bigger wave must have reached her nicely, causing her eyes to open fully for the first time in 10 hours.
“Guess what?” He looked at her with a mischievous grin. Oh boy, what is it this morning…
“I’m going to be in the Wall Street Journal.”
She couldn’t hold back the surprise and excitement as her voice made this strange pitch between a cartoon character and a 10 year old girl.
“Are you jealous?” He asked her with an even more devious smile; as if this was the best news of all, another chance to win against someone in the rat race of life he was constantly competing in. A race many of us don’t realize is going on. She remembered her insecurities of receding personal growth, stagnation in career, and wasted potential.
“A little bit, but more excited for you than anything,” she wondered if the greatest success to him is beating others more than the accomplishment itself.
He told her about this rat race and weaved it into many conversations about work ethic, success, life. Essentially everything you do while on Earth is part of a competition against every other human. While he was a proponent of social justices and helping the starving tribes compete at a lower handicap than they were served, he wanted to be among the top. Every decision he made served this goal to be #1; he chose the career that would allow him to scale wealth exponentially, he chose a school that would don a pedigree that could let him sit and mingle with the children of the elites, he even joined clubs solely based on the chance of its members becoming the “billionaires who will run the world.” She scoured through every collegiate club’s website, but they all seemed to lack this barrier to entry in their mission statement.
How often do we know the next Jeff Bezos before he starts listing books online? Are all of the Elon Musks and Warren Buffets acutely aware of each other and who they will see at the top? Do they live exclusively in a society of their own? Can an outsider win the golden ticket to the chocolate factory by gaining access to their resources, ancestry, and power?
Being a college grad of a private school to which she felt she gained nothing but some other-worldly (read: privileged) experience, she struggled with her next steps in life. She thought she could join the ranks of the Forbes 100, or forge her own path through entrepreneurship and hard work. Somehow, she landed in a regular-person job. Working regular-person hours, but was delightfully content with the optimistic vision of high commissions that were half heartedly instigated by her managers. At least at first, she was content. Slowly, his dreams became hers and the sheer power with which he spoke would sink into her skin, melt into her muscles, and take up residence in her being. She was no longer content, and she did not see a world in which she could ever be content again. That’s the trouble with taking someone else’s dreams- they will never fit you correctly, but manifest themselves in depressive thoughts, poisonous self-doubt, and a loser’s rank in the rat race.
She let his devilish comment slip by, and he has already moved onto his next victim, calling his mother to tell her the good news. Her eyes were still adjusting to the light of morning, and her brain was still adjusting from nightmare to living daydream. Million-dollar mansions floated by her head as she imagined a life with a billion-dollar man. Still, there was the unmistakable pain of fear in her gut.
The Wall Street Journal, huh? Nice.