Why do people chase money and achieve success?

– The problem of success – it seems to me that right now this idea is slightly declining. The endless race for success sooner or later leads to psychological burnout in any person. Nevertheless, this story still exists, and with the emergence of social media it has only intensified: it feels as if we are in a constant race and competition with each other.

Recently I was reading a book, and it told the story of how in Rome they wanted to open a “McDonald’s” in the main square. The Italians, of course, were outraged and were categorically against it. But it was not possible to stop it – everything was tied to certain agreements.

In response to this, they launched the “Slow Living” movement. At first it was about “slow food” – as the opposite of “fast food.” That is, the idea is to eat slowly, consciously, to enjoy food, preferably prepared according to traditional recipes, in the circle of close people. And then this evolved into the concept of “slow living,” which now, especially in the United States, is spreading quite actively among the younger generation.

It’s interesting what you think about this.

– You said interestingly that the concept of success seems to be decreasing and people’s стремление toward it is declining. I think this is connected with your personal feeling – with how you yourself have come into contact with this state.

If we look at society as a whole, even taking into account the concept of slow living, and take, for example, Silicon Valley – seemingly one of the most progressive places – I do not see slow living there. People there do not walk during the day, do not go to the ocean. Where are they? They work. These are constantly busy, constantly involved in processes people, living at a very high pace. We live in a world of a crazy rhythm, where a person consumes a huge amount of content: scrolling reels, watching series, reading books or, on the contrary, going into their desires.

What is success?

Everyone has their own understanding. For one, it is a good job. For another – millions or billions. For a third – completely different criteria. Someone will say that a person striving to earn a billion is striving for success. And the one who wants 10 million – is he not? Or vice versa?

Here everything comes down to what goals a person sets for themselves and whether they correspond to their real life.

From the outside it may seem that you are endlessly striving for success. For example, they might say to you: “You appear on an artificial intelligence channel as a regular participant, which means you are striving for success.”

And you can answer:

– I do this because I was invited;

– because it is part of my life;

– because I am interested in understanding how the technological world works;

– because I am interested in the people I interact with.

The reasons can be completely different. Therefore, the question is always how people from the outside define what success is when someone strives for it. Another point is what a person themselves feels inside, why they need it.

If a person says: “I want to increase my income tenfold” or “I want to become famous” – it is important to understand what stands behind this: what goals, what internal parameters, what motives. The most important question: what stands behind this action and why does the person perform it?

And who possesses this information – whether a person strives for success or not?

There are people – I know them – who are very silent, closed, do not post anything on social media, but at the same time are in an incredible thirst for power, money, profit, in a state of constant striving to be present everywhere. And there are people who are very open, posting everything everywhere.

We hosted the previous episode on the To The Moon channel, and someone wrote: “Alexander, in my opinion, everything is clear, it’s already enough to say that you live a rich life.” I sit and think: where did the person derive such an image? First of all, why did he decide that I live a rich life? Secondly, why did he decide that I want to talk about it? Probably, if I wanted to tell him what kind of life I live, I would talk about other things.

That is, he says this based on his feeling of understanding another person’s actions – from his personal perception. And the one who, for example, writes: “No, that’s not the case, the person acts differently,” – he also speaks from his own perception.

When we approach the question of how to look at all this, it is very important for each person to pay attention to themselves: does this capture you inside, you personally as a person? When you post a photo on Instagram or Facebook, or when you tell someone something – what drives you?

I recently spoke with a person I hadn’t seen for a long time. He was telling me something. I was walking down the road and thinking: “Why is he telling me this?” We are used in the modern world to communicate in the mode: “Everyone says what they consider necessary, when they consider it necessary.” People rarely truly listen to each other or genuinely connect. People simply find themselves in the same space, and then each performs their role, but these roles are not even connected with each other. And you find yourself in a space where you become a participant in these conversations, in this flow. And you cannot at that moment say to the person: “Why are we discussing this?”

– Some people do.

– Yes, but in society this often leads to a stupor, to limitation of relationships and to a lack of understanding of how to be with this person further, how to be with them and communicate.

For example, I invited you to help me shoot a video. If you think about success in this video, about how you look, about how people will hear you, about wanting to convey your ideas – you may realize all of that. But you will not fulfill what you were invited for. You know that I invited you to help shoot a video – not for everything else listed.

Can a person simultaneously help and remember another person, and at the same time do something for themselves? This is the social ability – to live in society and perceive it.

Someone will say that this is manipulation – to both help and think about how you look, and understand that many people will watch the video, and that it will attract an audience. But this is normal, and it is normal to acknowledge it. Moreover, it would be normal if you came to me and said: “I will help you shoot the video, but I would like it to be done at a good level, so that I am in a comfortable space, because it is important to me how people perceive me.” This is normal. And it would be true.

The key point from the perspective of success is how a person feels.

Then this topic captures the person. Why? Because the person thinks only about themselves. If a person thinks only about themselves, of course it will capture them.

If I talk about something and think only about myself, nothing good will come of it. I can convey information independently of myself, as if from the outside, tell what truly lies within my consciousness and perception, within the impulses and thoughts that come from the spiritual world, in the full breadth of perception, and try to answer the question truly honestly, without thinking about what will be said about me.

Because “what will people think about me” is a manipulative characteristic that relates to the topic of success.

– If we talk about the race, about the fact that ideas capture a person from the outside – this is very interesting how you described it.

But even inside a person there is a feeling: how to measure it – 10 million dollars, a billion, a trillion? It seems as if it never ends, there is never a point where you are satisfied with yourself. You look – and there is another layer of success, and another. And at some point life is already over, and where was it? The feeling that it passed by. How to distinguish the other side: when a person has no desires at all, no ambitions, like an amoeba? That is also considered wrong.

Where is the healthy balance between ambitions, striving for success, and at the same time attention to oneself and living one’s own, including spiritual, path?

– We determine whether a person is an “amoeba or not” based on external evaluation. This is our characteristic. But each person has their own large internal process of life and perception. And to truly understand this process, it cannot be looked at with an ordinary взгляд and conveyed through conversation. It can only be understood through broad, real perception.

How to do this?

The first thing to understand: each person has an infinite multifaceted variation of these boundaries – from minus to plus. And everyone has their own concept of balance in life.

• For one person, it is absolutely natural to create projects because there is an internal impulse within them. They do it not because they are smart or have read books, but because they have such a spiritual system, such an internal structure. It arises naturally within them.
• Another person does not have this impulse, and they do nothing. This is not related to the physical body, education, or family. People usually compare exactly this: body, education, parents, country.

But there is a huge layer of factors – mental and spiritual – that influence much more strongly than being born in a sheikh’s family or in a poor family, being born in Palestine or Monaco, being beautiful or not, healthy or with limitations. These factors are far greater, and they form the presence or absence of internal impulses.

Therefore, there is no single mechanism that will say: it is good to have 10 goals or 20, it is normal to want a million or abnormal to want ten million, it is good to have two children or bad to have ten. This is all an illusion.

And this is the main answer: if people tried to perceive another person independently of themselves – without their own opinion, without social attitudes, without accepted “facts,” including scientific ones – but tried to truly see what moves them, why they act this way, where these impulses come from.

Why, for example, are twins born in one family, and one has an impulse to kill a kitten, while the other has an impulse to protect it? This is a very illustrative example. Where does this impulse come from?

Everyone starts looking for reasons: someone said something at school, they saw something somewhere. But the conditions are the same. Sometimes the one who saw more “bad” things, on the contrary, does not проявляет this impulse, while another simply has it arise. It can appear without cartoons, without social media. It simply arises – and the person goes and does it. People do not want to study this because it does not fit into the привычное materialistic thinking.

A person does not want to look there – neither in themselves nor in others. They do not want to investigate what is really happening inside: how a person feels, what impulses they have at a given moment in time and why they do or do not have this thirst. The state of thirst, a certain insatiability, can have different characteristics. For this, one needs to broadly consider where impulses in a person come from at all.

Are these impulses that arise due to psychophysical traumas or heredity? Are these impulses that come due to the life they have lived and acquired? Are these impulses arising from karmic causes and effects within their spiritual being? Are these impulses coming from their spiritual structure? Are these impulses related to the country they live in?

Where do these impulses come from?

They can come through interaction with other people. And then this is an introduced impulse, not their own “self.” This is not their noise – it is external noise, and it is precisely this that creates problems for a person.

This is a complex topic, it is difficult to discuss. I remember once a person said: “I clearly realized: when I sleep with my wife, I feel very complex worlds. Therefore, I will no longer sleep with her in the same bed.”

Imagine that you have some complex internal worlds that activate at night and affect the person рядом, for example, a husband. How developed do people need to be to calmly discuss such things? Because usually people start inventing: “He doesn’t like something,” “he doesn’t like my body,” “he doesn’t like how I breathe or snore.” But that’s not the point. The point is the influence of energies that a person cannot cope with.

A person says: “When I sleep alone – I sleep perfectly. As soon as someone appears nearby – I feel bad. I wake up in the morning completely exhausted.” Do people study such things? No. In the same way, they do not study where the impulse to start a business or become famous comes from.

A huge number of processes are connected with the energies among which a person lives. Among us there are many dark energies and negative entities. There are different levels of perception: one can be in layers where there is only neutrality, purity, or light. If we live among heavy energies, then there is an influence on a person. For example, the influence of the ego is incredibly strong and is present in everyone. In some it manifests more vividly.

• One person has the desire to renovate just to prove to everyone that they have something beautiful.
• Another – because they have an internal sense of beauty, an understanding of aesthetics.

For example, I am always irritated when they say: “Modern fashion among the rich is to wear the same T-shirt.” I say that a person simply has no impulse toward beauty, no such energy. They simply lack the perception of beauty. You can explain as much as you want – they will not understand it.

– That’s interesting: did the person suppress this within themselves or did they not have it initially?

– Most often people live outside of awareness. In the modern world, people are not aware of what is happening – this is important. They have a developed thinking apparatus, which potentially can lead to awareness, but in most cases they simply move in the flow. It is like movement in a multidimensional river, in an ocean of space; like a train moving in multidimensional space that cannot be stopped. A person is inside this movement.

Therefore, to think that a person “suppressed their sense of beauty” and therefore wears torn socks, or that they “consciously abandoned aesthetics” and therefore do not wash their hair – this is a simplification. The point is that it does not consume energy.

People’s understanding of many things, in particular the concept of beauty, is completely different; at some level they may intersect. At the point of intersection, we can say that it is beautiful – it does not consume energy, it does not require more time. You either feel it and realize it from within in some way, or you do not. Then there are many other layers in terms of skill, experience, investing effort, attention, developing certain states, and everything else.

But there are impulses that are disabled in a person, and whatever a person does, they will not restore them. For example, there is an impulse of easily spending time with a child. I spend time with children quite easily. I have different aspects of perception with them, I notice them, observe a lot: them, my thoughts, states. For me, spending time with four children would not even raise a question.

If you called and said: “Sasha, I need to leave on Saturday, can I bring three children?” I would not even think of refusing. If I am generally free, I would say: “Bring them, what’s the question? Just tell me what to do with the little daughter, how to feed her.” Because she is very small, I would have to allocate more time to her. And I will ensure safety for your other children, and then it is my right: to play with them or not. If you say: “Sasha, you must plant plants with them or give a lecture,” – here I might object. But in general this is my space of interaction: I relate to children easily.

There are mothers who are born with this – it is not just easy for them, they have an endless transmission of the feeling of love. They simply do not know what to do with it – it flows and flows. Yes, they have difficulties: they are also irritated if the child stains something or does not do something. But this feeling that arises in interaction with the child prevails over everything else.

– It seems to me that this is exactly Polina, your wife.

– And there are people who cannot spend even a minute with a child. Every time they see them, they have an internal tremor. And here it is important to look at what is really happening.

Because even a person who, like me, easily spends time with children – I can honestly say: we do not know what is happening in the head, for example, of Polina. Because one can play different roles, be simultaneously in different states. This is an important point – in what role you are and what you show.

I know what states arise in me, and whether I am ready to discuss them. And if a person says: “I cannot be with a child,” – it is important to understand what exactly is happening in them, what kind of state it is. Because in the same person there can be a huge amount of energy where they will very easily do certain things with children.

Just like my wife, for example, cannot do everything related to organizing children’s lives – planning, structure. She can spend time with them, but cannot plan their future, financial stability, certain systemic things. She can let it go, let it pass by. And this is also the presence of certain energies. I am not diminishing or elevating anyone here.

– It seems to me there is no person who can cover the entire spectrum.

– Bingo! Therefore, it is important to recognize these factors and not try to argue with them.

For example, I have a fairly good sense of beauty in interior design and certain things. But there are areas where I lack perception. I look – and do not understand how it should be. I do not have this internal answer. And I know that if I ask you, you will say: “Do it like this here,” – and it will appear. And I simply do not have that area of thinking.

This is a problem of modern society: people want to be smart in everything, want to understand everything. But the question is not in education, but in the presence of perception.

Somewhere I see better than a doctor, psychologist, or psychotherapist. And somewhere – worse, because I do not have that perception or knowledge. Then I calmly and honestly acknowledge it. This is very important – to honestly acknowledge. If a person learns to honestly see their different aspects, not avoid them, not ignore them, but truly look – then they begin to understand.

For example, I sometimes catch myself on a simple moment. I can change several outfits in a day. It happens that I go out, for example, just to walk the dog, and notice: there is a small stain on my sleeve. Or I am about to go into the city in a jacket – to pick up my daughter, go to the store. It would seem, what difference does it make? No one will notice. But I do not go out with that stain.

And I track: is this a natural perception or a distorted one?

If it does not cause tension, suffering, if it is simply a feeling of cleanliness and harmony – what is the problem? Change the shirt and go. But if it comes from an attitude, from fear, from an imposed rule – that is already a problem. If it turns into a psychosis, affects priorities, makes you late, affects other people – this is already inadequacy, an inability to set priorities.

If you truly look at this situation, it is very complex for external definition. Here only the person themselves is capable of truly finding and understanding it.

For example, looking at your interaction with children, I see your ability for deep perception. You may have limitations, some aspects of imagination, details, or something else, but these are just additional settings – you simply decided to act this way.

It is similar to how I live with children and my wife – I act in one way. But as soon as I am alone, I begin to act completely differently in some everyday matters. This is not because I shift responsibility onto my wife. It is simply how the process has arranged itself, how it has developed. If I am alone, a system or service automatically arises that takes this on. This does not mean it is difficult for me to do – it is a matter of time distribution.

Someone might say: “Do you put your time above your wife?” No, that is not the case. I simply have a huge number of tasks that I perform. And this is a choice of different priorities, different zones. Plus, I understand what happens to me further if I perform certain actions.

Each person has their own understanding. There are people who plan 20 steps ahead. They have such an impulse, such a volume of energy, that they see many possible mistakes in advance. This is how their system works – they do not wait for something to happen.

For example, my computer is connected to an uninterruptible power supply. I know that if the electricity goes out, it will continue working. I did this not because the power went out 10 times, but because such a mechanism is built into me.

There are people in whom it does not work. And no matter how much we try to achieve this – it is difficult for them. They will suffer, and we will suffer, because it will seem to us that the person “does not want to think” or “does not want to act.” But that is not the case – they simply have a different perception system.

And here the question is in the ability to relate to people in the following way. I try to relate to my children the same way as to yours, and the same way as to any children on the street. And the same – to you, as to any woman. There is no woman whom you love more or less – this is a wrong direction of thought. To everyone – equally. At the same time, I understand that there is my child, my friend, my wife, my parents, close people. All of this exists simultaneously.

And in the same way, when it comes to tasks, I understand: this person is the same as everyone else, even if they are not capable of doing something, if some part of their perception does not work, if they do not understand technology or cannot analyze complex things – on one hand. On the other hand – at a specific moment I may not work with them, because I understand that they are not capable of completing the task. And I have the right to do that.