E você, trocaria um tremendo triunfo profissional por um brutal "murro" pessoal?

Sobre os recentes e díspares acontecimentos na vida de Sandra Bullock, David Brooks escreveu um recomendável artigo para o NYT. Uma das questões que levanta está no título deste post, mas esta dicotomia entre as relações interpessoais e o sucesso económico e profissional suscita muitas mais interrogações. É sobretudo importante perceber que, contradizendo os nossos dicionários, êxito não é sinónimo de felicidade e que a maior parte das vezes, tal como aconteceu com a actriz, não temos a hipótese de escolher.
O interesse do artigo prende-se igualmente com a correspondência com outras escalas: países, fases da vida, etc. Pelo meio fala-se também de confiança, de relações sociais e, sobretudo, de felicidade.

Destaco algumas partes:
Two things happened to Sandra Bullock this month. First, she won an Academy Award for best actress. Then came the news reports claiming that her husband is an adulterous jerk. So the philosophic question of the day is: Would you take that as a deal? Would you exchange a tremendous professional triumph for a severe personal blow?
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Marital happiness is far more important than anything else in determining personal well-being. If you have a successful marriage, it doesn’t matter how many professional setbacks you endure, you will be reasonably happy. If you have an unsuccessful marriage, it doesn’t matter how many career triumphs you record, you will remain significantly unfulfilled.
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The overall impression from this research is that economic and professional success exists on the surface of life, and that they emerge out of interpersonal relationships, which are much deeper and more important.
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The second impression is that most of us pay attention to the wrong things. Most people vastly overestimate the extent to which more money would improve our lives. Most schools and colleges spend too much time preparing students for careers and not enough preparing them to make social decisions. Most governments release a ton of data on economic trends but not enough on trust and other social conditions. In short, modern societies have developed vast institutions oriented around the things that are easy to count, not around the things that matter most. They have an affinity for material concerns and a primordial fear of moral and social ones.
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