I’ve lost the life I once pursued, but I’ve become a happy failure

By the standards of my younger self, I’ll always be a failure. And that’s fine with me.

Our culture is obsessed with riches and status. We unconsciously judge people according to their level of success. We’re envious of those who get ahead and those who have more than we do. We judge others harshly — sometimes loudly and sometimes silently — for not living up to their “potential.”

I grew up this way. Maybe you did, too. I wanted success and power and money. I saw those things as the path to status and freedom. And I expected myself to be very successful.

But something happened along the way. I learned there was a tradeoff between worldly success and personal satisfaction with life. I learned that I couldn’t “have it all.” I struggled for years to find a compromise between the two — to see a way to follow incompatible values. And I failed.

When I crashed, I crashed hard, like a train jumping off its tracks. I went off the rails about 15 years ago — metaphorically speaking — and refused to move until I could figure out what had gone so terribly wrong. Why I felt like a failure.

I finally discovered that my culture had lied to me.

I had tried to pursue incompatible values. The world’s values wildly contradicted what I read in the words of Jesus and in the wisdom literature of Hebrew scriptures. But I didn’t notice this because the dominant world culture was so powerfully present in modern churches.

Jesus told us not to pursue riches, but the world said to do it anyway.

Jesus told us that the meek, the hungry and the poor in spirit were blessed, but we saw them as losers. We honored the bold and powerful and successful.

Jesus told us to love our enemies. Not just tolerate them, but actually love them. But we openly hated our enemies — and we seemed eager to make more enemies all the time.

The gospels are full of advice and commands that are absolute nonsense to people who are steeped in the values of our culture. The same is true for the wisdom literature of Jewish scripture.

But we gave lip service to the advice and commands and wisdom that we found — and we worked hard to find ways to somehow pretend we could follow the world while pretending we were following what we read there.

When I was young, the culture at least pretended to honor these values that we found in Christian and Jewish scriptures. Today, there’s not even much pretending.

For a young man who grew up in a theologically conservative church — and also absorbed the success and wealth values of the mainstream culture — the message was clear. It was never overt, but it was there:

We give lip service to these religious niceties in our sermons, but when we leave church, “realistic people” store up all the treasures in this life that we can find. And what’s so bad about hating people? Jesus would hate this guy if he had to deal with him, right?

I carried these contradictions with me for a long, long time — without even realizing they were there.

In the last decade or so, I’ve had to face those contradictions. I’ve had to see the impossibility of following Jesus and following the world at the same time.

For me, the choice was clear. I could quit pretending I cared about the spiritual and ethical values I claimed to believe in — or I could stop pursuing the culture’s values. I could do one or the other. Not both.

I no longer care about being successful. I no longer care about becoming wealthy or powerful. I don’t care about my status among others.

I’m clear about what my values are. I’m not always perfect about living up to those values. At times, I can fail badly. But I know what’s right. And I know what’s wrong.

The ambitious young man of my past would have no patience with me today.

The teenage David or the 25-year-old David would have been baffled that I’m no longer grasping for success and wealth. Even today, there can still be a questioning voice in the back of my head — asking whether I should be living up to my potential by showing the world how well I can perform.

But the further I get from caring about the culture’s values, the happier and the more comfortable I get with myself. I’m more relaxed. I’m a better human being. I treat others better. I find that I can love others more easily.

The younger version of myself would see me as a failure. As a loser. That no longer bothers me.

Because I have peace and love in my heart that I never could find when I was using the wrong measure of real success. I’m happy with the trade I’ve made.