Member-only story
Race
Contentment may be your definition of personal success.
But that is not okay with the world.
We want our people to be shiny, young,
with pretty hair and perfect skin.
We want them to run out of the subway
clutching their laptops like life depends on a click.
They must make haste as they type away
the next big status with the next big hashtag.
Create the next new disruptive technology
to complicate the stock market a notch more.
We want our people to be doing something
all the time for the fear of idleness.
We drill in them, ‘Don’t stop, keep going,
and God, don’t ask if any of it makes sense’.
We’re scared, too, because what if they take a pause and realize
they never wanted designer shoes that match their colored contacts?
‘Look at this shiny thing,’
we tell them, ‘Come, fetch’.
So when, by some miracle, you realize
you don’t want to be their kind of ‘successful’,
You don’t want to run the race like
you’ve been trained in schools and colleges,
You turn into a mirror that reflects
all of humankind’s insecurities and greed.
The secret is:
if you stop, you render the race pointless.
