What drives your soul?
Are you most driven by:
?
I've spent a considerable amount of time deeply contemplating this for myself.
I've been driven by all 4, and there's inevitably some fluctuating between all of these for all of us.
Success... If you've followed me (either for a long or short time), you will know I have a chronic distaste for the concept of success.
First of all its subjective, but also..
It's been hijacked by capitalism + commercialism to mean: wealth + shiny objects = success.
But even if we define it as "ambition" I still have issues with it.
Ambitions can change when we mature, and when they don't they can become huge complexes.
Pursuit of success has a habit of getting in the way of happiness too...
Kindness
I've had a significant realisation about kindness in the past 5 years or so.
Namely, if I am unkind to somebody (anybody) that brings a tremendous amount of guilt, sadness, existentialism and unhappiness my way for quite some time afterwards.
It doesn't really matter who it is, even if I was successful in making my enemy (I don't exactly have one but I can think of people I really don't like) unhappy, that would actually still make me quite unhappy.
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Even though I can definitely be insensitive at times, I do strive for kindness and really always have done.
Having said that, I have to constantly remind myself to be kind, because I can get impatient and blunt with people.
Happiness
If we approach the whole thought experiment here scientifically, we might go down the "selfish gene" route and consider every one of our actions we do to fulfil our own human needs.
Now, I've not read that book yet but I can imagine that it probably concludes the same way as most studies of selfishness do and will state that we are inherently social creatures that don't just need ourselves to be well, but need our whole tribe to.
This is an extension of what I was saying about kindness...
Although it results in your own happiness, it's not because of that happiness you choose to be kind, it's because seeing other's unhappy hurts.
Virtue
Now, virtue is tricky because it kind of ties all of them together in a way.
It's kind of an easy way to answer the question ("what drives you"), something the Stoics are very aware of.
But the thing is with virtue is it introduces ethics and morality - which is another area where my kindness can trip up.
Politics;
If somebody is doing something that hurts others - how do we deal with that? It's definitely important to consider.
But for now, I'd like to strive for kindness as my chief motivator. Success can f off. The others should help me be more kind.