I saw a sentence recently: success is the sum of small behaviors.
It sounds reasonable.
Do small things consistently.
Let them accumulate.
Eventually, they become something large enough to call success.
But I got stuck on one word.
Success.
What is it?
Not how to become successful.
Not which habits produce it.
Just what success actually means.
The more I thought about it, the less obvious the answer became.
What counts as success?
Perhaps success is getting what you consider worth getting.
But that immediately creates another problem.
One person might consider financial independence success.
Another might consider having enough time with their children success.
Someone else might want recognition, knowledge, freedom, peace, or simply a quiet life.
And achievement isn’t necessarily success either.
Someone can achieve exactly what they spent years trying to achieve and still wonder why they wanted it in the first place.
So perhaps success is not simply getting something.
Maybe it is getting something that was actually worth having.
But even that seemed incomplete.
I started thinking about what success would mean if nobody were watching.
If nobody knew how much money I made, what my job title was, what I owned, or what I had accomplished, what kind of life would I still consider successful?
I didn’t have a good answer.
Then the question went somewhere stranger.
The ultimate success
I realized that, at least within my own way of looking at things, I could describe the ultimate success very simply:
Not existing.
At first, that sounds absurd.
But only if we assume that this life is the whole game.
There was a time before I existed in this world.
There will be a time when I leave this world.
I don’t know what “before” means in any deeper sense.
I don’t know what comes after.
I don’t know whether there is anything beyond this life at all.
But I do know that my existence here has a beginning and an end.
So perhaps this life is only one part of something larger.
Or perhaps it isn’t.
Since nobody knows the whole game, it seems equally reasonable to consider only the part we can actually observe.
And if I do that, the idea of success becomes even stranger.
Because existence itself comes with rules that I never agreed to.
I have to eat.
I have to sleep.
I have to maintain this body.
Time keeps passing whether I want it to or not.
I can choose what I eat, but I cannot indefinitely choose whether I need food.
I can choose when to sleep, but I cannot indefinitely choose whether I need sleep.
I can choose many things about my life, but I cannot choose whether my body has needs in the first place.
So from that perspective, not existing would be the ultimate escape from the demands of existence itself.
No hunger.
No tiredness.
No need to solve anything.
No obligation to keep the machine running.
That was the thought.
And then I started wondering whether that really was such a strange definition of success.
Maybe life is a game
I began thinking of life as a game.
Not because I think life is literally a game, but because the analogy exposed something.
There seems to be a kind of Level 1.
Survive.
Eat.
Sleep.
Stay safe.
Have somewhere to live.
Obtain money.
Maintain your health.
Deal with problems.
Repeat.
Then perhaps, if you become sufficiently secure, you can enter something like Level 2.
You have more freedom.
You can choose where to live.
You can choose how to spend your time.
You don’t have to accept every job simply because you need the money.
And perhaps there is a Level 3.
What do you actually want to do with all that freedom?
But then I noticed something.
Nobody actually clears Level 1.
You don’t graduate from it.
You don’t receive a little notification saying:
LEVEL 1 COMPLETE
A wealthy person still has to sleep.
A retired person still has to eat.
Someone living their dream life still has a body that requires maintenance.
Level 1 keeps coming back.
Every day.
You can become very good at it.
You can make it easier.
You can build enough resources that other people take care of some of it for you.
But you never permanently finish it.
You just return to it again and again.
And eventually the game ends.
There is no winning screen
This was probably the most unexpected part.
If everyone eventually reaches the end, then what exactly does “winning” mean?
You can accomplish extraordinary things.
You can become wealthy.
You can become famous.
You can be loved.
You can build something that outlives you.
You can live a life that other people would consider extraordinarily successful.
And eventually:
Game Over.
Not because you failed.
Not because you didn’t finish.
Simply because the game ended.
Nobody, without exception, gets to say:
“I cleared life.”
There is no final screen saying that you completed all the objectives.
And perhaps this means that the idea of winning life is based on a condition that doesn’t actually exist.
But Level 1 is not merely annoying
There is another part that I hadn’t considered at first.
It would be easy to look at survival as some kind of low-level inconvenience.
But Level 1 can be incredibly difficult.
For some people, getting enough food is already a major struggle.
For others, housing, illness, safety, money, family responsibilities, or countless other problems can consume nearly everything they have.
Some people spend almost their entire lives trying to stay above the line.
And there is no shame in that.
If the first level is extraordinarily difficult, simply staying alive can itself be an enormous achievement.
Perhaps that explains why so many conventional definitions of success look like “passing Level 1.”
A stable income.
A house.
Enough savings.
Good health.
A safe family.
These things sound ordinary only when we forget how difficult they can be.
But there is something worse than having to eat
Then I noticed another distinction.
Sometimes I eat because I want to eat.
That’s easy.
Sometimes I eat because I don’t particularly want to, but I know I have to.
That’s different.
My body has made a demand, and I have to obey it.
But there is an even more disturbing possibility:
I can be hungry.
I can want to eat.
I can need to eat.
And still be unable to eat.
Now I don’t control either side.
I didn’t choose the need.
And I don’t necessarily control whether I can satisfy it.
That seems much closer to what I mean when I think about being being at the mercy of life.
It isn’t merely that life gives me things I don’t want.
It is that life can impose a need upon me and sometimes deny me the ability to answer that need.
And this applies far beyond food.
You can be exhausted and unable to sleep.
You can need money and have no way to obtain it.
You can desperately want to leave somewhere and have nowhere to go.
You can need another person’s help and discover that they cannot give it.
You can want someone to love you and discover that wanting it doesn’t make it happen.
Existence gives us needs, desires, limitations, and vulnerabilities.
And we don’t get to negotiate the basic rules beforehand.
So what is success?
At this point, I don’t have the answer I thought I was looking for.
I started with:
Success is the sum of small behaviors.
I thought perhaps we could work backwards from that sentence and discover the behaviors that produce success.
Instead, I ended up questioning whether there is a final success condition at all.
Maybe success isn’t winning.
Maybe it is having enough freedom to choose how to play.
Maybe it is reducing the amount of your life that is completely dictated by circumstances.
Maybe it is having enough food when you are hungry, enough rest when you are tired, enough money that every problem doesn’t become an emergency, and enough freedom that not every decision is made for you.
Maybe success is simply making as much of your existence yours as possible.
But even that isn’t an ultimate victory.
You still have to return to Level 1 tomorrow.
You still have to eat.
You still have to sleep.
You still have to deal with whatever arrives.
And eventually, the game ends.
So perhaps I was asking the wrong question.
I was asking:
What do I need to do to win?
But maybe there is no winning condition.
Maybe the better question is:
If there is no winning, what makes playing worthwhile?
I don’t know yet.
And strangely, that may be the most honest conclusion I can reach.
There is no winning screen that I can see.
But I am still here.
So perhaps the question is not how to win, but what to do with the fact that I am here.
It all started with a sentence about success in life, a game where there is no winning screen.