Edel Coffey: A rising tide lifts all boats - Paul Lynch's Booker triumph is all of ours

Maybe Gore Vidal just didn’t like his friends very much but when my friends succeed, rather than feeling like I die a little, on the contrary, I often feel even happier than when I succeed myself. 

In my experience, personal success comes with all sorts of baggage, anxiety, and self-doubt, whereas a friend’s success is a simple and pure experience of unadulterated joy.

Mostly, I’m just hoping that they won’t outgrow our friendship and dump me for nights out with Taylor Swift.

I spoke about this topic last month at the Maeve Binchy festival, ‘Echoes’, in Dalkey. The event was called ‘A Rising Tide Lifts All Boats’ and was a reference to Binchy’s renowned and bottomless support for fellow Irish writers. 

The idea that success (and life) is a zero-sum game is such a futile and damaging philosophy. 

The notion that if someone, somewhere is succeeding, you must somehow be losing out as a result is such an impoverished state of mind. 

This so-called scarcity mindset is a hot topic in the world of self-help publishing. 

It began with Stephen Covey’s book The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, who first identified the term, but Rhonda Byrne’s The Secret played a big part in introducing the idea of ‘abundance’ to the world. 

The Gore Vidal quote came up at that event as well as it doesn’t seem to apply to Irish writers. Indeed, Irish writers in general have a great reputation for supporting each other. 

We seem to feel that any success our countrymen and women experience can be taken as communal success, and we enjoy it accordingly.

I thought of that event again last Sunday night as Irish writer Paul Lynch was announced as the 2023 Booker Prize winner for his fifth novel, Prophet Song. 

I watched with delight as the Irish book community flooded social media to express its pride and heartfelt congratulations for Lynch. 

I was thrilled to see such genuine delight for his success. Irish writers do seem to be unusual in their support for one another.

Perhaps it has something to do with being a small country and knowing that we are all connected in some way. 

If we don’t know each other personally, we are sure to know someone’s cousin or sister or somebody they went to school with. 

No matter how successful we get as Irish people, we always remain connected to each other and grounded by the close ties of our small country. 

I think that’s what makes us partake so wholeheartedly in the joy of others’ success, not just in the literary community, but across the board. 

When Katie Taylor or Kellie Harrington wins a match, or when we win a medal at the Olympics or, hell, even when someone local wins the cash machine prize on the radio, we’re happy for them because we feel connected to them.

The more connected we are, the better life is for everyone. 

I see this myself in small everyday things like the driving behaviours of the small community where I live and the comparative difference in driving behaviours in anonymous big cities. 

In a small village, chances are you’re going to know the person crawling along in front of you or faffing about at the right filter light, so you hold back on the impatience and irritation because, really, wouldn’t it be embarrassing to treat your neighbour, a friend, someone you know in such a rude manner? 

I tend to continue my local driving behaviours wherever I go now and find imagining every person I encounter as a friend, or a person I know through friends, as an excellent enforcer of positive and polite behaviour.

The same goes for the online behaviour that has made social media such a difficult, unpleasant place to be. 

If we stopped before posting harsh comments and asked ourselves would I say this to a friend or to somebody whose family I knew, nine times out of 10 those comments would never be posted. 

If we looked at each other as friends, how much gentler and more positive might our experience of life be?

We don’t have to know each other, or each other’s families, to forge a human connection with each other. 

By sheer dint of our humanity, we can easily find that connection with most people and by respecting each other’s basic humanity we can probably navigate and solve most problems. 

Realising we are all connected and celebrating that connection every chance we get is a sure path to a more generous and fulfilled life.