Greatness in Society

Over time, greatness has come to be a standard goal of people in society. In essence, achieving greatness has become one of the main motives for a person's every action. Greatness is defined as an extent, amount or intensity considerably above normal or average. Likewise, If everyone were to achieve greatness, in turn, no one would be great anymore: for no one would be above average.

The evolution of greatness puts enormous pressure on students and society today. As people continually get better, smarter and stronger on average, the standard of greatness rises as well. For example, in sporting events records can only be broken; they do not oscillate or get worse over time. Regardless of when studies are taken, world records of sports are always becoming more difficult to set, acknowledging a continual trend. Like that of sports, society as a whole has raised its standard of living and expectations. One hundred years ago it wasn't necessary for everyone to graduate college in order to have an above-average job: now it is. These increasing standards will only make greatness in the future more difficult to obtain and will require much more effort from people wishing to attain it.

Most of the time, greatness can be measured. Questions such as - Who is the best tennis player, or fastest runner at this time?- have one definite answer. By means of competing and testing, the majority of life can be measured against itself, enabling society to define greatness. While many social aspects of greatness can be measured, some can not. Categories such as writing, art, music and other qualitative aspects of life, appeal to society sensually, making it extremely hard to acknowledge one particular piece as better than another. Every person's likes and emotions are different. Who then has the authority to actively judge which piece of art, music or writing is considered great? Society today tries hard to set standards of greatness on these things. This begs the question, can qualitative arts be given a quantitative value of greatness?

Greatness will continue to have both definitive and relative traits. Because greatness pushes people to do better in all they do, greatness is, in turn, the reason for societal progression.