From Villány to Tokyo

Book excerpt: “I was born at the end of World War II, and so I was young in the ’60s. This means that I belong to the so-called (at least in Hungary) ‘great generation’. Young people of this generation, especially in America and Western Europe, rebelled against the existing system, showing their dissatisfaction by protests, new types of music and by outrageous clothes and behaviour. We – here and in the other socialist countries – experienced this, only because of the limitations of the repressive system, in a much gentler way. I have never been a rebel myself, and yet what tied me to this great generation was my desire to know the world much better, to be more informed than the average, to be a real cosmopolitan. That is why I studied languages and travelled much more than most.” “The evolution of people’s lives can be very diverse. Many people ask what makes someone successful or less successful. Genetics, education, its narrower and broader environment, circumstances, luck, etc. can all influence the evolution of an individual’s life. Success itself is subjective. Success can be material and not material, and the measurement of success always contains a kind of comparison to someone else. The concept of happiness further complicates this already very complex issue.I would say that success comes hand-in-hand with satisfaction. If people are satisfied with what they have achieved, they can claim to be successful and vice versa. Full satisfaction, of course, can be very misleading. People’s ways of life are very similar to a product’s life-cycle curve, as taught in marketing. Birth is followed by youth, then early adulthood, mature adulthood and ends with ageing.”