Debate: Can you be successful without Spirituality?

About this event

Reddy and I are hosting the following series on Success: We had our introductory discussion on what is success. From that there seemed to be a consensus that the major drivers of success were the non material things, love, contentment, how you live etc. During that discussion I developed some follow up questions on which we will have discussions/debates: But before that, the Zoom link will be posted shortly before the event. During the discussion, if you want to raise a point please raise your hand and you will have up to 3 minutes to speak. Once a speaker talks there will be a 5 minute period where anyone can follow up with a counter point, question, or continuing thought along the same line of thought (leave such comments to 1 minute). But do not begin a new train of thought unless you raise your hand. If you find yourself dominating the conversation please relax and give others a chance to join in. 6/4 Discussion: Is being successful a good thing to strive for? (Or is it better to just live and enjoy your life?) We decided that a drive for success is innate like the desire of a salmon to swim upstream to reproduce. Allowing that drive to take on societies version of success is probably wrong, but developing an individual form of success is more nuanced and may be good or bad, depending if you have an adequate understanding of yourself. 6/11/26 week: What is our greatest drive as humans? To optimize our lives 6/18/26 week: What is our view on what success is as a society? Money, Continuation of Society/Species, Community 6/25/26 week: Is success inside or outside us? It is a mix, usually for younger people more outside as you get older more internally driven. But ultimately, if it is determined by happiness and contentment it has to be internal. 7/2/26 Week: What does it mean to be yourself? The statement "be yourself" has implicit assumptions including: there is a yourself to be and that it is best to be yourself. This is in comparison to the imperative to "know yourself" which implies that you need to evaluate yourself and correct any character flaws you may have. I think the best was a yin and yang relationship between "be yourself" and "know yourself" proposed by Sonny where you perform the self analysis to know yourself and then you go about being yourself in everyday life allowing you to do further analysis taking into account direct experience. But in direct answer to the question, being yourself seems to be the ability to both know what your values are and act in accordance with them. 7-9 Discussion: Is an individual’s view of success more legitimate than that of the group or vice versa? We thought that the group has a large effect on what success ultimately is and your options to move etc. to put yourself in different scenarios are there, but may be limited. So it is situation dependent but is likely the groups view. 7-16 Discussion: How are success, what is good and happiness related? Happiness is often an essential ingredient in being successful as you need to be engaged to be successful at something. And happiness often comes from doing what is good. 7-24 Discussion: Is success how you live or what you accomplish while living or both? A common theme we found was that a feeling of gratification/meaning comes from accomplishing a goal, solving a problem or overcoming a constraint. These are "how you live" subjective feelings and are the main intrinsically valuable things we experience in life. Whereby material things like say a large house does not have any intrinsic value. Therefore, we believe it is "how you live" that determines whether you lived a successful life 7-30 Discussion: Constant Craving- Can we ever be satisfied? We will listen to and discuss the following youtube video, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vao9HN_FqOE The video considered all non presentism to be bad as it believes the only place you can be happy and really successful is in the present. But the group was mixed as to whether or not the