What happens when achieving everything you wanted leaves you haunted by what you achieved?
For ages, we humans have possessed the nature of being victorious. We have had this desire to be champions, conquerors, and betters since the earliest civilizations. We have celebrated conquests and victories for centuries, praised the personalities behind those victories, and thanked God for them.
Far back from this time, almost 4,600 years ago, we witnessed conflicts between Sumer and Elam. Alexander’s expansion and conquest of many parts of the known world. The Persian Wars between Athens and Persia. Hannibal’s successes against Rome. The Mongol invasion of Baghdad. The Battle of Hastings. The Battle of Trafalgar. The First World War and the Second World War.
How many violent wars, great battles, and wars has this very ground seen? No one can count. Yet we rarely look at the number of lives lost, the civilizations changed, or what remained after the victory. We look at the victory itself. It enters into the books of history; its price gradually slips from the mind.
Well, if we talk about victory, it doesn’t come only in the sense of wars. It exists in the goals and achievements we have set for ourselves, at an individual level. We see it merely as the goal being accomplished, but rather as a victory against the odds, against opposition, against everything that stood in our way.
But have we ever thought about the cost of these victories?
What has it done? What impact has it left?
Perhaps we have. But if we did, we often forgot it over time.
Yet for some, the victory itself has haunted them until the very moment of their death.
Follow along- yes, you read that right.
It left them with a haunting victory.
Now the question arises: how can a victory haunt a person when it was the very thing he worked for, the very thing for which he had given almost his entire life?
Let us come to an example.
Consider the time when the world had witnessed one of the biggest wars ever in the history of human beings. Not only between two tribes, or between two nations, or between two armies, but between alliances of nations, with half of the world on one side, and the other half on the other.
The First World War.
Every country’s people dreamed only of victory. Everyone fought for it, worked for it, sacrificed for it, so that their countries could overcome their enemies. Scientists, physicians, biologists, chemists, engineers, labourers, peasants, workers, the old and the young, everyone devoted their lives to serving their countries, leaving behind their own personal interests.
In that pursuit, there were people who reshaped the dynamics of warfare.
One of them was J. Robert Oppenheimer, the scientific director of the Manhattan Project.
A man who worked on a weapon capable of changing the course of war, a weapon that could give his country an unprecedented advantage, eventually came to understand the terrifying consequence of what human beings had created.
As Hiroshima and Nagasaki were bombed, Oppenheimer had to deal with the implications of that accomplishment.
He later recalled the Trinity test:
“A few people laughed, a few people cried, most people were silent.”
Then some words stuck with him forever:
“Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”
I notice something else in those three reactions, though.
The laughing people.
The crying people.
The silent people.
Maybe the laughter is for those who feel they’ve won when they’ve won. They witness victory, triumph, and the downfall of their foes. The goal has been accomplished, and therefore there is something to celebrate.
That’s a victory whose price is the loss of human life; the crying people are the ones who know that. They see the fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters, sons, daughters, and beloved people who will never return.
And then there are the silent people.
Perhaps they are the ones who begin to understand something beyond the victory itself.
They know that “The world would not be the same”.
They know that they have transgressed another border within human nature. That what was once thought impossible is now possible; that the hands that created, built, discovered and progressed have created something that can destroy, on an unimaginable scale.
What were we?
And what are we becoming?
What was our purpose?
And on which path are we now walking?
For Oppenheimer, the achievement did not remain merely an achievement. What he helped develop became a burden for him for the remainder of his life. He had helped accomplish what he and others had been asked to accomplish, yet the accomplishment itself became something he could not escape.
And this is where victory becomes strange.
We spend years pursuing something. Just for that one moment, we give up time and comfort, relationships and peace, and sometimes parts of ourselves to reach that moment and say: finally.
I did it.
But what if, after reaching there, we discover that the person who wanted the victory is no longer the same person who achieved it?
There are many examples of people who eventually came to regret what they had achieved.
We rarely see the cost while working toward something. Our eyes remain fixed on the destination. We count the reward before we count the price.
And perhaps this is one of the strangest things about human nature.
We measure victory by what we gain.
Rarely by what we had to lose to gain it.
Every achievement has a cost.
Every victory has a cost.
And perhaps the cost is not always paid at the moment of victory.
Sometimes, it is paid years later, when the celebration has ended, the crowd has disappeared, and the victor is finally left alone with what he has achieved.
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