我们想要的不是物质，而是背后的情感反馈，这赋予奢侈品一个崭新的意义。下次你看到那些开着法拉利跑车的人，你不要想“这个人很贪婪”，而是“这是一个无比脆弱、急需爱的人”，也就是说，同情他们，不要鄙视他们。
这就是为什么我们如此在乎事业和成就，以及看重金钱和物质的原因。我们时常被告知我们处在一个物质挂帅的时代，我们都是贪婪的人。我并不认为我们特别看重物质，而是活在一个物质能带来大量情感反馈的时代。
不一定是你我的母亲，而是一个理想母亲的想象，一个永远义无反顾的爱你，不在乎你是否功成名就的人，不幸地，大部分世人都不怀有这种母爱，大部分世人决定要花费多少时间，给于多少爱，不一定是浪漫的那种爱，虽然那也包括在内，世人所愿意给我们的关爱、尊重，取决于我们的社会地位。
势利鬼的另一个极端，是你的母亲。
今日最主要的势利，就是对职业的势利。你在派对中不用一分钟就能体会到，当你被问到这个21世纪初，最有代表性的问题：你是做什么的？你的答案将会决定对方接下来的反应，对方可能对你在场感到荣幸，或是开始看表，然后想个借口离开。
对那些来访牛津大学的外国友人，我有一个坏消息，这里的人都很势利。有时候，英国以外的人会想象，势利是英国人特有的个性，来自那些乡间别墅和头衔爵位。坏消息是，并不只是这样，势利是一个全球性的问题，我们是个全球性的组织，这是个全球性的问题，它确实存在。势利是什么？，势利是以一小部分的你，来判别你的全部价值，那就是势利。
现在或许比以前更容易过上好生活，但却比以前更难保持冷静，或不为事业感到焦虑。今天我想要检视，我们对事业感到焦虑的一些原因，为何我们会变成事业焦虑的囚徒。不时抱头痛哭，折磨人的因素之一是，我们身边的那些势利鬼。
我提出这件事是因为，我认为不只有我这么感觉。你可能不这么认为，但我感觉我们活在一个充满事业恐慌的时代，就在我们认为我们已经理解我们的人生和事业时，真实便来恐吓我们。
我经常对事业感到恐慌，周日下午，晚霞洒满天空，我的理想和现实的差距却是这样残酷，令我沮丧的只想抱头痛哭。
The nightmare thought is that frightening people is the best way to get work out of them, and that somehow the crueler the environment, the more people will rise to the challenge. You want to think, who would you like as your ideal dad? And your ideal dad is somebody who is tough but gentle. And it's a very hard line to make. We need fathers, as it were, the exemplary father figures in society, avoiding the two extremes, which is the authoritarian disciplinarian on the one hand, and on the other, the lax, no-rules option.
I think it's merely the randomness of the winning and losing process that I want to stress, because the emphasis nowadays is so much on the justice of everything, and politicians always talk about justice. Now I'm a firm believer in justice, I just think that it's impossible. So we should do everything we can to pursue it, but we should always remember that whoever is facing us, whatever has happened in their lives, there will be a strong element of the haphazard. That's what I'm trying to leave room for; otherwise, it can get quite claustrophobic.
So, I'm going to end it there. But what I really want to stress is: by all means, success, yes. But let's accept the strangeness of some of our ideas. Let's probe away at our notions of success. Let's make sure our ideas of success are truly our own.
So what I want to argue for is not that we should give up on our ideas of success, but we should make sure that they are our own. We should focus in on our ideas, and make sure that we own them; that we are truly the authors of our own ambitions. Because it's bad enough not getting what you want, but it's even worse to have an idea of what it is you want, and find out, at the end of the journey, that it isn't, in fact, what you wanted all along.
And we also suck in messages from everything from the television, to advertising, to marketing, etc. These are hugely powerful forces that define what we want and how we view ourselves. When we're told that banking is a very respectable profession, a lot of us want to go into banking. When banking is no longer so respectable, we lose interest in banking. We are highly open to suggestion.
And the thing about a successful life is that a lot of the time, our ideas of what it would mean to live successfully are not our own. They're sucked in from other people; chiefly, if you're a man, your father, and if you're a woman, your mother. Psychoanalysis has been drumming home this message for about 80 years. No one's quite listening hard enough, but I very much believe it's true.
Here's an insight that I've had about success: You can't be successful at everything. We hear a lot of talk about work-life balance. Nonsense. You can't have it all. You can't. So any vision of success has to admit what it's losing out on, where the element of loss is. And I think any wise life will accept, as I say, that there is going to be an element where we're not succeeding.
What I think I've been talking about really is success and failure. And one of the interesting things about success is that we think we know what it means. If I said that there's somebody behind the screen who's very successful, certain ideas would immediately come to mind. You'd think that person might have made a lot of money, achieved renown in some field. My own theory of success -- I'm somebody who's very interested in success, I really want to be successful, always thinking, how can I be more successful? But as I get older, I'm also very nuanced about what that word "success" might mean.
Not for the sake of our health, though it's often presented that way, but because it's an escape from the human anthill. It's an escape from our own competition, and our own dramas. And that's why ween joy looking at glaciers and oceans, and contemplating the Earth from outside its perimeters, etc. We like to feel in contact with something that is non-human, and that is so deeply important to us.
Our heroes are human heroes. That's a very new situation. Most other societies have had, right at their center, the worship of something transcendent: a god, a spirit, a natural force, the universe, whatever it is -- something else that is being worshiped. We've slightly lost the habit of doing that, which is, I think, why we're particularly drawn to nature.
The other thing about modern society and why it causes this anxiety, is that we have nothing at its center that is non-human. We are the first society to be living in a world where we don't worship anything other than ourselves. We think very highly of ourselves, and so we should; we've put people on the Moon, done all sorts of extraordinary things. And so we tend to worship ourselves.