The Accomplished Man
"Well, now that I've won, suddenly winning doesn't seem like that big a deal after all," was what the accomplished man thought on a semi-regular basis. He had spent all his life chasing the highs of ladder-climbing , and having now the flavors of success firmly within his grasp, it suddenly seemed like a great bunch of nothing. Though he could gloat for a good long while about how much harder he had worked than the rest to attain what he did, ultimately, it did not matter, for it was so very quiet living at the top. Becoming the top businessman in the world was not all his mind had cooked it up to be, and now he realized that this endless pursuit of wealth had landed him in a void of vacuously empty office buildings, vast glass panoramas overlooking an empty city of desolate retail spaces and crumbling social orders.
One night, as he slept, a specter appeared in his dreams. It was an awful sight, with a dreadful visage and a ghoulish howl, its voice filled with the horrible cries of billions of untold souls from miseries past. "Leave me alone. Please go away," he said to the unwelcome ghostly stranger. "I cannot go. I will not leave," said the specter. "What must I endure for you to leave me be? Will you impart me with wisdom or force me to change my ways in some fashion or another?" "Why should I care how you behave or what you believe." "Then why have you come to me." "No reason in particular," the specter replied with a chilling vibrato. "I am a nightmare that comes to all living creatures, good or bad, noble or cruel, whatever the distinction. You have done nothing more than the common man to warrant this visit.
After this brief, unusual conversation, the specter dragged him by the neck into a realm of grotesque occurrences: lines of people lining up for blocks over tastless scraps of food, brother against brother, gunning each other down over a sip of water from a melted plastic bottle. Apocalyptic visions of futures not too distant were projected through his nocturnal theater. Endless displays of carnage and brutality permeated all his senses, sending him gasping awake back into the realm of reality.
It was morning again. The sky was gray. The man sat up in his four-poster bed in the minimal tasteful wares of his intricately dressed bed chamber. The specter was nowhere to be found. How disturbingly real it all felt. His mind had a way of reminding him how fragile his world of achievements truly was. Much as he tried to believe his hard work and business acumen could thrust him into a land of constant comfort, ultimately, he knew his luxurious lifestyle clung precariously from a thread woven off the backs of so many faceless, anonymous masses, slaving away in the heat domes outside of his bountiful castle. The specter was right, he surmised. At this stage of the game, there was no value in imparting some Scrooge levels of moral redemption or character change. Whether he decided to become more generous or not, ultimately, the gesture would be empty, for there was nothing he could do alone to change the course of time. The accomplished man ate his bountiful breakfast of berries and gourmet toast. He returned to work, where he sat in an air-conditioned office with spacious interiors and chairs that reclined into decadent positions. As he sat listening to his fellow chairmen, exchanging ideas about how best to make those quarterly gains, he couldn't help but think how pointless it all seemed. The accomplished man simply sat and nodded, occasionally interjecting in the business conversation during well-timed intervals. What few words the king speaks must always be filled with wisdom and value. When all was said and done, he shook hands and called the meeting to a close. Little was accomplished for all that was uttered. The accomplished man walked back to his suite, knowing full well the specter would return to visit him again, soon and frequently, whether he deserved it or not.