I have had a thought bubbling in my head the last few days that I think I am ready to put to words. It started when I was enjoying a slice of pizza.

It was a great piece of pizza. The crust was soft and high quality, the sauce was tangy and fresh and the cheese was flavorful. I was very grateful to be enjoying this slice of pizza.

I then started thinking about the person who made it. Was he as proud of his work as I was pleased to enjoy what he had made? Surely, no one could be fulfilled from just making pizza at a pizzeria, right? What about the person who owns the restaurant? Maybe they have found fulfillment from their success? If I have a day where I do not project something, I feel useless. Everyone must want to create.

I continued on with this chain of thought until another one occurred; my big life goal will happen when I have an amazing career. I want to be an author, the sort who people talk about at dinner tables over pizza and who people argue about what he meant by this line or that word choice. I want to hear someone tell me that one of the characters I wrote is their favorite character out of all the characters they have encountered out of all the books they have ever read. I want someone to tell me that it’s their favorite character in all of media–I think I could die happy if I heard that.

For me, career success=life success. If I was making pizza, I would not be happy. I was taking my sole criterion for fulfillment and feeling that it must be shared by everyone. The person who made me my pizza could very well have an entire list of criteria that I do not for happiness. Perhaps they are fulfilled, and it is not coming from their job. Perhaps they do find fulfillment from cooking.

This summer I am taking a full class load, but a couple of the classes are really, really easy. In my stress management class today (taken to fulfill a health credit over the summer), we did a sort of personality test that divided us into different kinds of people; logical, creative, grounded and empathetic.

The teacher noted that in our society, creative people are a minority compared to grounded people. The majority does not wish for uncertainty; they want quite the opposite, stability. They want things they can see and touch. Things that cannot be contested. They do not want to create.

I think a part of me agrees with what the teacher said. Yet, that same part of me went on another pizzeria-worker-is-not-fulfilled chain of thought, this time with a bit of an angry bent. The majority is useless, I thought. The majority is happy just living, making money, growing old and then dying.

I caught myself, feeling guilty. Again, I was applying my own criteria to other people’s lives. I feel sad on days I do not write anything. I feel like if you are not putting something with your name on it out into the world, you may as well not have ever been here. Maybe others do not. Maybe they find fulfillment differently. They almost certainly do. And if they do, they do not view themselves as useless, and I have no right to think of them as such.

Everyone is a different person. To me, art is one of the most important things in all of life. Without my written word, I would feel like I have no purpose or meaning.

And yet, many people in the world have never read a single book.