There’s a of talk about the fear of failure and how limiting that can be. However, I’ve seen hardly any talk about the fear of success, which can be even more limiting. I’ll share my take on that in this post.
One of my concerns with success is the greater responsibilities that almost always come with advancement. For example, a manager or supervisor of a company often can’t send rude or dangerous customers to the next person up the chain. They’re the ones who have to handle such people after they get sent up by those lower down in the chain. Someone who owns the company definitely can’t pass along troublesome customers, huge financial errors, or other major issues to somebody else. Instead, they have to be the one to take responsibility, lay down the law, and have the final say on the matter, even if they don’t want to. I’ve had a hard enough time with rude customers and coworkers. I don’t want to have to handle that and far worse.
There are also concerns about the lifestyle changes that would at least sometimes be required in order to move up to the next level. With many jobs, that means working more hours, which leaves a lot less time for friends, family, hobbies, and other meaningful parts of life that make work worth doing. I hate that idea as well as the thought of giving up or majorly cutting back on habits, routines, activities, and objects that are familiar, comfortable, and overall pleasant. Those things all help me relax, destress, and prepare myself for work and other difficult, unpleasant activities. Without them, or without nearly as much of them, how could I handle the hard things in life without getting burnt out and failing at everything?
At the bottom of all of this is impostor syndrome along with a hefty amount of guilt and shame. All of that has me believing I don’t deserve whatever good opportunities or things come my way and that I’m not capable of handling them. I still almost always feel like a little kid disguised as an adult who doesn’t know what to do while everybody else is an actual adult and knows exactly what to do, and that I’ll someday get found out. That’s why I’ve turned down many good opportunities that I could have easily handled and sometimes even actively root against myself. As bizarre as that sounds, I hope that this post as a whole explains the why behind the what clearly enough.
In addition to still feeling like a little kid, I wish I could go back to being one. And I don’t mean doing a reverse of the movie Big where I go to bed one night as an adult and wake up the next morning as a kid in 2026. I mean waking up as a kid in one of the years when I was still a kid. I’d love nothing more than to have fun while doing some light, easy tasks as others take care of all the big, important, difficult, dangerous, and unfun things for me. Even though I’ve gradually taken on more responsibilities over time, everything I’ve accomplished in life thus far has been done within a framework that has shielded me from ultimate failure and prevented me from having to do as much for myself as most other folks my age end up doing. I still can’t imagine accomplishing bigger things or even continuing to do what I’ve done so far while I’m either out on my own or while living with different folks in a vastly different situation than I’ve always known. The harder life gets, the more I want to be a kid again so I can take care of minimal responsibilities that are easy to handle, spend most of my time doing things I enjoy, and visit with my friends and loved ones who are still on Earth. Although I was almost an adult when my dog Sawyer came home, I’d still go back to that time so that we could relive our eleven years together. Knowing what I know now, I’d be a much better friend to him than I was while he was still alive on Earth.
These sorts of posts usually end with a plan I have to keep making progress, fix the problems in my life, take advantage of my strengths, and make it to the next level. This post won’t have that. I don’t know where to go from here or how to get there. The older I get, the more life seems to take me away from play and drop me into work. I wish I knew how to reverse that before too many more years pass. Considering how much of my life I’ve already lost to school, work, and all kinds of unpleasant human interactions, is it too much to ask that however much life I have left be filled with much more leisure, peace, love, play, fun, and joy? I don’t think so, and I hope that I can find some way to make that happen.