Work, work, work, and he feels his heart, his mind, and his self-worth breaking and chipping away into a million little pieces. He works for his wife, he works for his friends, he works for his boss, for his church, his community, his family, but never for himself. However, even working for himself would do nothing to heal the pile of mush he has become. Nothing can and nothing will. They said if he worked hard enough all his dreams would come true. They told him his entire life that he could achieve anything he set his mind to, but now looking at the unrepairable broken waste pile of a man he has become, he knows that they were wrong and his life has been wasted away. He is broken, and his spirit is lost and gone forever. Humans do not know what is good for them. Setting hopes on unachievable dreams and giving everything to reach them is detrimental to the human spirit because the human mind evolves at a rate too fast to keep up with, which can be seen throughout so many historical examples and pieces of literature warning against a person working their life away.  

There are so many tyrants, authoritarians, and dictators seen throughout history who let their world views and search for success take over and destroy their lives. It happens often when leader promises a road to escape from oppression and succeeds, but then the public’s view becomes too much for the person to take. They become the image created instead of who they were created to be. Essentially their fame eats them.  

Arguably the most infamous example of this was Adolf Hitler. He was an excellent leader, an amazing public speaker, and probably a maniac. He pursued a perfect, pure, Arian race, one that he was not even a part of. Essentially, he used that view of perfection to turn a whole nation of people against Jewish culture, blaming them for the suffering the country had faced. It is human nature to jump at any chance to escape the peril that was facing Germany, so when Hitler introduced a national cleansing, many nationalists jumped at the chance. This was also an example of the hive-mind effect. There are several stories about brave souls during the holocaust who harbored persecuted Jews and other cultures which had become the Nazi bane. However, for every one of those stories, there were three real examples of people not standing up to the genocide. People would turn in their neighbors, their children’s best friends to save their own. Because of the fear of persecution and the human instinct to do whatever the people around someone are doing, the whole country jumped enthusiastically onto Hitler’s psychotic plan. Eventually, when failure struck and a whole nation of people swarming with his views suddenly turned directly against him, the only option Adolf Hitler had was to kill himself. His ambitions caught up to him and his image was too heavy to uphold, so the only option was self-destruction.

Society has adopted this culture over the years of whatever a person applies themselves to the most will come true and all of a person’s dreams are attainable. That simply is not true. Not every little boy can be an NBA star and not every little girl can be a ballerina. Now, that’s not to say that those occupations do not exist or that the people who do occupy those jobs did not work hard and dedicate themselves. The point simply is that sacrifice is a real thing. A common video surfacing around social media recently is of a high school valedictorian giving his speech to his senior class. He admitted to regret dedicating himself so hard to attain that position because while he was going to accept several benefits from that hard work, he missed out on several normal high school experiences that he would never get back. For the rest of the speech, he urged his fellow graduates to take a deeper look at themselves and see what they really want in life and how working towards that goal would benefiting instead of taking away from them and their life experiences. A person giving their all to attain everything does not always work. As a society, people also tend to change their minds.  

As the world evolves and more things are available to more people, it is vital to know whether a person truly wants to dedicate their entire lives to a certain subject, or if their true calling is simply around the corner. Human beings change their minds terrifyingly fast. Several doctors have ended up divorced and unhappy because they worked their lives away only to lose all social ability. Politicians are hated and lawyers are seen as arrogant. Celebrities lose their personal lives while reclusive scientists have no life outside of themselves and their work. Humans can never and will never be happy. It is simply impossible. Therefore, someone dedicating their entire life to a certain goal, no matter how noble it might be, will result in being extremely detrimental to the person. When they achieve that goal, which they really might, they look back at all the things they could have had but instead were obsessed with the chance that now is over.  

One piece of literature that excellently personifies this ironically is the movie Megamind. In this movie, the protagonist has dedicated his entire life to being evil and destroying his counterpart. The movie is a meshed-together net meant to make fun of pop culture’s famous superhero icons. Everything the hero and the villain do is predictable and cliché until the villain, Megamind, accidentally destroys his hero. Then there is no one in the way to stop him from taking over the city and he realizes that the ultimate control is not what he loves and needs. He needs the chase. He lost the chase. He tries to “raise” a new superhero to become his counterpart and, in the end, becomes the superhero himself. He sees how to defy old norms and break old societal standards. He realizes, as must this nation and world, that dedication to one thing is detrimental when that one thing is achieved. That is why is so important for a person to have balance in their life. With balance in his life, the man at the begging of this paper could have found happiness. However, he gave that up in search of something better always around the corner and now he cannot be fixed.  

Society needs to realize how to balance out their lives and find joy in the mundane before their current path destroys everything. Just as in the example of Adolf Hitler, soon society’s ideals will catch up to them and be their doom.