The Leiter side of life…

Is it true that we don’t deserve something unless we suffer for it first? And do we really want to suffer for it if it means success brings about loneliness?

Sometimes I wonder if it’s true that we, as Americans, feel we need to suffer in order to make a reward ” well deserved.”  I also wonder if people fear success for the inevitable loneliness it brings with it.

I was thinking about what to write for a post today and I got to thinking about what I like to write the most.  Coincidentally, the posts I get most fired up about writing are the ones that people like the most. At first, I thought these were my cynical rant posts.  At a closer look at my WordPress stats, that was not the case.

“The quarter life crisis” post, the “Are you sure this is decaf?” post and the “Finally…a published piece!” are three of my most popular posts.

I got to thinking what these three posts have in common and started questioning their popularity.

The three themes these posts have in common is overcoming a challenge.  The fist being overcoming the negativity a quarter life crisis can bring about, the what-not-to-say in a restaurant comments are overcoming and making light of difficult people and the published piece story is about the months of hard work I put in to a story I believed in to see it finally get published, overcoming fears and stereotypes.

These are all seemingly very difficult challenges that involved a lot of uncontrollable factors.  People love to read about things that are difficult and love to read about how to deal with them.  In each one of these posts, I don’t actually overcome th uncontrollable factors, I just find ways around them.  People admire that, but do people want to go out and do things like that themselves?

It’s not easy to accept that some successes have to be achieved in different ways than originally planned.  It would be easier to just sit around and complain and say, “Well, that’s not going to happen.”  I know because for many years I was like this.

Now it is true that I posted all these stories on my Facebook timeline and that surely lead to an increase in traffic, HOWEVER, I have posted other blog posts on Facebook that haven’t gotten nearly as much traffic.

That brings me to another point.  People love to be part of a group, just look at Facebook’s success if you don’t believe me.  People want to feel that their successes are shared.  I think our generation has a hard time succeeding on their own because of this.

I am no different.  I recently undertook the task of changing my life.  No easy feat for sure.  I changed my “career path” to one that is seemingly very difficult to break into in the time of a down economy where the industry is constantly changing.  I am planning on moving across the country.  And I’m learning to let go of the things in the past that I cannot control.  Growing up/changing my life- whatever you want to call it.

To know that most days I’m doing this all on my own is exhausting.  Most days it doesn’t affect me as I’m excited for all these changes, but some days it’s just straight up difficult.  I guess if it were easy, people would do it more often.  What’s more is when you do something independently like changing your life and you do it for yourself, it’s not a bad thing, but it’s uncomfortable at times and lonely and most people avoid loneliness.

Which reiterates my second question, do people fear the loneliness that comes with success?