The Desire for Success is the 2nd Enemy of Living the True Life, according to French philosopher Alain Badiou

(The 1st enemy is the desire for pleasure: https://steemit.com/philosophy/@petrmisan/the-1st-enemy-of-living-the-true-life-according-to-french-philosopher-alain-badiou)

On the other hand, the second inner threat for a young person is seemingly the opposite: the passion for success, the idea of becoming someone rich, powerful, and well established.

Not the idea of consuming oneself in immediate life but, on the contrary, of obtaining a good position in the existing social order.

Life then becomes the sum total of tactics for becoming well established, even it means you have to be better than everyone else at submitting to the existing order so as to succeed in it.

This is not the regime of instant gratification of pleasure; it’s that of the well-conceived, highly effective plan.

[....]

Basically, when you’re young, you’re faced, often without being clearly aware of it, with two possible life directions, which are sometimes overlapping and contradictory.

I could sum up these two temptations like this: either the passion for burning up your life or the passion for building it.

Burning it up means the nihilistic cult of the immediate, which, by the way, may very well be the cult of pure revolt, insurrection, insubordination, rebellion, new, dazzling but short-lived forms of collective life, such as the occupations of public squares for a few weeks.

But as we see, as we know, there is no lasting effect, no construction, no organized control of time in any of that. You march under the slogan “No future.”

In only three years, [The French poet Arthur] Rimbaud ran the whole gamut of youth’s two possible directions: the absolute rule of immediacy and its pleasures, or the rough patience required by the duty to succeed.

He had been an itinerant poet, and he would become a colonial arms dealer.

'The True Life' by Alain Badiou https://www.amazon.com/dp/B071KTZ6MG