Personally, I prefer to redefine "success" to be whatever I already have, thus at all times am I am a success!
Re:Story of the Mexican Fisherman
by kirubakaran on Tuesday March 18, 2008 @02:13PM
(#140014)
Well, success actually is the ability to be able to redefine "success" to be whatever you already have. So, you succeeded there too.
Re:Story of the Mexican Fisherman
by Prrometheus on Tuesday March 18, 2008 @08:33AM
(#139768)
I like the point that you took away from the parable. However, most of the time someone shows me a parable like this it is to criticize the modern capitalist, consumptionist lifestyle. These critics idealize the primitive and believe that economic progress has made us corrupt and unhappy (although, strangely, you never see them moving to any of the primitive countries they idealize). Rarely do they understand the full consequences of the ideas they support. Nothing makes me angrier than the anti-materialists except maybe the legions bitching about income-inequality, which strangely often are the same people.
But I suspect that, like most parables, this one isn't meant to be taken literally. It's illustrating a psychological point, the folly of treating life as a means to an end. There's great risk in devoting one's life to something not for its own sake but because one assumes that, somehow later, happiness will result.
I appreciate the parable because, like many people, I need to be reminded to examine that assumption.