"I earned this".
I heard that in class. Can't remember from whom, or exactly to what purpose. I believe they were trying to justify the work they'd done, to get the success which they had now. Perhaps they were justifying their spending habits. It's a point of pride, I suppose, to say that the rewards I got were from my own force of will, that nobody gave anything to me.
And it's a lie.
Not entirely. On a microlevel, on a level solely on what you could or could not have done, yeah you earned it. You performed the actions, you put forth the effort, and you reaped the consequences. But the world doesn't operate on a microlevel. It is a vast conglomeration of forces all interacting with one another, causing one another and being caused by one another. To say that you got to where you are solely because of what you did--and more starkly, to say you earned it--is to ignore the vastness of the world you stand on, the world of which you are a part of.
Let me give an example. I am in NYU. I got accepted to this university after the university accepted my application. They did this by looking over my essays, my grades, and my background, and depending on one's perspective, they judged either that I was worthy of going to the university, or they did a numbers calculation and decided I was likely to improve their stats. Regardless, by accepting me, they overlooked other persons who also applied. Perhaps if certain other people had applied, people with more impressive credentials or more likely to improve university stats, they would have chosen them instead of me. Perhaps if my ethnicity and class were different, they would have overlooked me for someone else.
And of course, to be accepted, I had to be in certain positions. I was dependent on my parents, both engineers, who earned money to raise me in our household, and put a substantial amount of money in my college fund, that I even come close to affording a college at NYU. I was dependent on my grandmother, and in a morbid way on my grandfather dying several years earlier, allowing my grandmother to spend money that would have been spent on him (or money that came from my Grandfather's will) to further pay for my education in high school and college.
And of course, I was dependent on my parents and how they raised me. They in turn were dependent on their parents and how they were raised, and so on. Further than that, I'm dependent on my father, who had to flee Romania after getting on the wrong side of the then-Dictator's wife, which allowed him to meet and eventually marry my mother.
But that's just on a family level. On a national level, I'm dependent on the continued economic stability of the nation, which is itself dependent on a myriad of factors: historical, social, political, spiritual, philosophical, and so on. I question, for example, if our economy would be so prosperous if we did not receive so many of our products cheaply from other countries, where the workers are paid substantially less than here, and live in far more unpleasant conditions. I question if my family would have the same house, same financial situation, if our society did not regularly discriminate against ethnic minorities, preventing them from reaching similar situations. I question similarly if the environment I grew up in were the same if there were less income inequality. Perhaps someone who is homeless right now might have, in another world, become an engineer that provided the same services my parents's company does, and my parents may have had to get a different, possibly less lucrative job.
Those are all hypotheticals, but they nonetheless service a point, which is that my current status in life is built upon all that came before me, and those factors which continue to this day. In terms of my personal successes, I feel I can comfortably say that it was through my agency that I was able to achieve them, but that is different from saying I earned anything. I don't feel I can be proud of my achievements when I know how much beyond myself went into them. Happy, sure. Satisfied, sure. But not proud. Not feel like I've earned them.
Because if I say that, I need to think about other people, people who might also have earned it, who might have worked harder than me to get what I got. But they couldn't, because their situations were such they were not given the opportunity to compete with me for my things. In that context, the swell of pride one gets from any achievement becomes a hollow feeling indeed.
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