What Will They Whisper After You’re Gone?

Or, do you have any Eulogy Virtues?

👋 Hey there! My name is Abhishek. Welcome to a new edition of The Sunday Wisdom! This is the best way to learn new things with the least amount of effort.

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Q: Why do so many people feel empty and unhappy despite having all the success in the world?

There are two characters in all of us. They are of opposing natures. The first one is pretty familiar. It wants to build, create, produce, and discover. Let’s call it The Achiever.

The other one has very different priorities. First, it has a solid sense of right and wrong. It not only wants to do good, but also be good. Second, it wants to love selflessly, put others before itself, and follow some higher truth. And more than anything, it wants to build a strong moral character. Let’s call it The Server.

We live in a contradiction between these two characters. The outer, majestic Achiever and the inner, humble Server are completely incompatible.

While The Achiever wants to conquer the world, The Server wants to serve it. While The Achiever is creative and savours its own accomplishments, The Server sometimes renounces worldly success for the sake of some higher calling. While The Achiever wants to get out of the comfort zone and venture forth, The Server wants to return to its roots. While The Achiever’s motto is Success, The Server’s motto is Charity.

The harder part is, not only do these characters have different priorities, they also live by different logics. The Achiever lives by a straightforward utilitarian logic. It’s the logic of economics. Input leads to output. Effort leads to reward. Practice makes perfect.

The Server on the other hand lives by an inverse logic. It’s a moral logic, not an economic one. You have to give to receive. You have to surrender to something outside yourself to gain strength within yourself. You have to conquer your desire to get what you crave. In order to fulfil yourself, you have to forget yourself. In order to find yourself, you have to lose yourself.

For The Server, success can often lead to the greatest failure due to pride. Conversely, failure can sometimes lead to the greatest success, characterised by humility and lessons learned.

You can visualise The Achiever as Gordon Gekko from Wall Street and The Server as Oskar Schindler from Schindler’s List.

Both are integral. Even though they are incompatible when observed individually, one complements the other when it comes to living a fulfilling life.

While the Server elevates your standards, The Achiever harnesses this strength. While The Server establishes the overarching direction, The Achiever propels you towards it with forward momentum. While The Server is more concerned with the Why, The Achiever is more concerned with the What and the How and the When. If The Achiever is the brain, The Server is the heart.

Alas we live in a culture that nurtures The Achiever but completely ignores The Server!

We’re often encouraged to market ourselves and excel in the skillsets needed for success, but we receive minimal encouragement to nurture qualities like humility, empathy, and genuine self-reflection.

This relentless pursuit of excellence overwhelms us completely. We’re pushed to embrace a utilitarian mindset, prioritising the satisfaction of some external standards, disregarding the moral consequences of our daily decisions on our inner self.

This only leads to the decay of the soul. It’s no surprise so many among us are left wanting, unfulfilled, and depressed.

When you blindly buy into the narrative of a utilitarian society and nurture only The Achiever in you, you slowly turn into a shrewd animal — a crafty, self-preserving creature who is adept at playing the game, and who also has this unique knack of turning everything into a competition.

You spend a lot of time cultivating “professional” skills, but you don’t have a clear idea of what adds meaning to your life. Years pass and the deepest parts of yourself remain unexplored. You constantly remain occupied with “important” things, yet you have a vague sense of anxiety that your life is not of much significance.

You find yourself doing things that would bring financial gain or success, even if they don’t align with your true desires or values. You live with a subconscious boredom. You start judging others by their ability and skillset, not by their character.

With each passing day, the voice of The Achiever becomes louder and louder while the voice of The Server becomes more and more muffled. While the life plan of The Achiever becomes clearer everyday, the life plan of The Server gets fuzzier.

In The Road to Character, the writer David Brooks mentions two kinds of virtues: Résumé Virtues and Eulogy Virtues.

Résumé Virtues are virtues you list on your résumé — the skills you bring to the job market which contribute to your external success — everything related to The Achiever.

Eulogy Virtues are deeper. They’re the virtues that get talked about after you’re gone — whether you were kind, brave, honest, faithful. Everything related to The Server.

The sad truth is that most of us genuinely believe that Eulogy Virtues are more important than Résumé Virtues, but despite that we spend more time thinking about the latter than the former. This results in a life that is only half-lived.

While the world we live in makes it very hard for us to focus on The Server in us, everything eventually falls flat in the face of death. No matter your excuse — lack of understanding or sheer stupidity — you would mostly be remembered by your moral character — how much you gave, how many you helped, and how fiercely you loved — or the complete lack of it.

Your Résumé Virtues slowly fade away once you’re gone. Your Eulogy Virtues becomes your legacy.

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I’ll see you next Sunday,
Abhishek 👋