Your life is not a ladder.
The capitalist fever dream of greatness only has two directions. But life has more.
I don't know why I still click on these videos with these faces when they pop up on my screen. I really should know better by now. Here I am, watching another millionaire entrepreneur on the Steven Bartlett podcast, blending into the long lineup of self-glorifying entrepreneurs coming before him, claiming to know “the difference between a great life and a mediocre life…” Declaring that some lives are great (namely the ones who build businesses, achieve commercial success, mill - and billionaires) while others are forgettable (the ones who work for someone else, boohoo, don't achieve any visible success, don't bring home the numbers).
The nerve to speak those words and believe them aside: For someone professing to be great they surely have a small, one dimensional view of the world. Believing that a life is great because it follows a capitalist script of success and everyone who doesn't is mediocre, shows a huge lack of wisdom or imagination. The fact that we rank lives in this way is pure capitalist hallucination.
Why does the myth of upward movement persist so stubbornly? Why do we measure greatness by vertical gain? Because we worship the climb. We idolise the ladder. The ones who ‘make it’ to the top.
When do we call a life “great”? When they’ve ‘worked their way up?’ When they’re ‘self-made’? When they’ve sacrificed their soul for a trophy cabinet? When they are a ‘four-time award-winning’ something? A Bestselling author? When they’re a TEDx-talking, burnout-glamorising genius? Somehow, we believe that ‘up there’ where it’s bright, that's where life is truly happening. That ‘up’ is better. Celebrity happens in the spotlight, that's how fame works, success isn't success unless it's visible. The glamour, the sparkle, the screens, the sky, bright, shining and hard to miss - that's where the gods are. There are no gods without people willing to worship.
What if we stopped being willing?
What if we widen our understanding of greatness? Our understanding of life itself?
Life is not a ladder. Life is a landscape. And much of it happens in the dark.
Life is not narrow and vertical, it doesn’t just go up or down.
Life is horizontal, unfolding, sprawling, vast. We don’t build life like a skyscraper.
We cultivate life like a garden. Life is a space to plant. To tend. To root. To scatter seeds of experience, relationships, creativity, discovery, rest, play, effort. Not every plant stretches tall and height is never the point. Some plants grow low, deep and widely. Life is an ever changing landscape bursting with variety: different species, sizes, colours, textures and purposes at different times.
Life is a landscape that honours the seasons. Seasons for watching things bloom and watching things die. Seasons for burying, for hoping, grieving, for wondering, waiting around, for messing up, digging up and starting again. There will be seasons that are barren, still and restorative, when the soil needs to breathe. Seasons where nothing grows and seasons where storms wipe out all the work. There will be abundance. And fallow fields. There will be seasons for harvesting and then…it just starts all over again. Infuriating, I know.
The capitalist fever dream will make you believe life is a ladder with only two directions: Up or down. Rise or fall. Win or lose.
This is not how a human life works. Life is not a tower of achievements.
Life is a rolling, expansive terrain, stretching outward. Like octopus tentacles reaching out. Like a belly, pregnant with life stretching outward. Like roots above ground, crawling through soil. Like plants who push their way through concrete. It grows in quiet darkness, steadily. Life always moves out and through.
Life is seasonal, vibrant, alive. Not a rigid fixture with only two directions. Every breathing thing is cyclical - why would we be any different?
Your life is not linear nor vertical. Your life is a breathing landscape. Reaching out wildly into whatever direction and space offers the conditions for it to grow, but always following a cycle.
Photo of me by my friend
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“Your life is not linear nor vertical. Your life is a breathing landscape. Reaching out wildly into whatever direction and space offers the conditions for it to grow, but always following a cycle.”
SIGH.
Thank you, Nadia. I really really needed this today, this week and this month. The fallow seasons are so hard to endure surrounded by those who call it failure and unproductivity, like a character defect. (My family). My bones know the truth that you’ve written so beautifully, like a poem, but my mind frequently forgets and spirals, the ego obsessing over how much “further ahead” or “more established I should be” at my age (just shy of 30).
Anyway, I’ll be returning to this piece. I think I almost need to print it out and pin it to my wall, read daily, until I remember this truth daily. Thank you for writing. 🌷
Ahahaha, this felt such a gentle gut-punch :) I’ve spent so long chasing “up” that I forgot life can grow sideways, quietly, beautifully.