My 5-year plan: get an internship at a big tech company, go on exchange, be part of student council, and join a design team. On the surface, those seem like good goals, but I couldn’t help but feel unsettled. What was the purpose of it all? Was it so I could be the one that other parents praised as an example for their own kids? More importantly, did these goals come from me, or were they just a product of the society I lived in, of the intersection of a time and a place?

In recent years in North America, and perhaps elsewhere as well, there has been an emergence of the idea of meritocracy – that “economic goods and/or political power [should be] vested in individual people on the basis of talent, effort, and achievement…measured through examination or demonstrated achievement.” Although this ideology cannot truly be realized in such a society where people are already placed on an uneven playing field from the moment they are born, its ideals has been largely incorporated into society and into the eyes of its citizens. Parents are scrambling to send their kids to learn this and that and pushing them to do well in school in the hopes that success will follow. Universities evaluate its applicants based on examination scores, and then personal achievements.

Have you ever opened up someone’s Facebook profile, and flipped through with envious eyes? They’ve worked at all the big corporations, was the leader of this, the vice president of that, won several scholarships and awards, and their profile, full of pictures with different friends and colleagues.

And you think to yourself,

this

is what the best life looks like, isn’t it?

Quite a handful of my friends are doing very well – in medical school or on the way, doing research with professors, an executive member of several clubs, and being so “busy” and “fulfilled”.

This

is what the best life looks like, isn’t it?

That’s what I believed for a long time. But I think we should all re-evaluate our scales and metrics before working towards things we never wanted in the first place. Why is it that a singular definition, based solely on individual success and achievement, our only evaluation criteria for a purposeful life? What if someone had all the success in the world, but was ignorant, superficial, and unempathetic? Would you consider that a life well-lived? Furthermore, what about the effects they’ve had on others?

Was he loved or was he hated? Is his death felt as a loss or does a kind of joy come of it? – John Steinbeck, East of Eden

And don’t tell me it’s happiness. As defined by psychology, an emotion is an immediate, specific negative or positive response to something we experience. It’s but a temporary state-of-being, a reaction to an event. Furthermore, psychological research has found that “humans quickly return to a relatively stable level of happiness despite major positive or negative events or life changes”. If we can’t get any happier in the long-term, then what is it that we should be chasing?

In the forgotten gaps of my time, taken up by entertainment in the forms of YouTube, Twitch and television shows, I had ignored the most valuable things I held– the ability to think, and the vast amount of accessible knowledge, like books and videos, telling people’s stories of a different time, place and culture. And that’s where I hope to find my answer: how are we to decide on the best way to live if we have known no other way than that of our own?