Lost resolution post from 2011

I found this lost post in my draft folder. It was set to be posted at around this time last year and was originally titled "New Years Resolutions 2011". It has been a good reminder of what I thought was, and what I still think is, important enough to be my only New Years Resolution for 2011.
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After spending the majority of my first day of the new year working on internship applications for consulting firms and Google, I chatted the rest of the night away with my mom on my Queen-size magnolia bed. After dinner, I asked my mom to tell me a story, and she decided to tell me the story about how my grandparents got married, what they were like as people, and the trials that they had endured in the political turmoil that marked China during the mid 1900s. Ever since my Grandma died this past summer, I've regretted not spending more time with her when I had the chance, getting to know her better (rather than having her lavish attention on me all the time), and being able to share with the next generation stories about her. My resolution for 2011 is to learn more about my own family history.

Tonight, I learned about my family from my mom's, which is a side that I'm less familiar with. Given the political chaos that defined China for most of the 1900s, the period that my grandparents lived through was a trying time entirely different from the one that I know. Life got progressively better for each successive generation. For my grandfather who was an orphan, illiterate, and poor for all of his life, he once expressed his greatest wish in life to be the ability to always be full from eating Wotou, a hard and coarse cornbread that my dad says tastes like cardboard.
When my mom was growing into an adult during her college years, economic reforms were just beginning to lift China out of poverty, and at one point she thought that her life would be perfect if she could just afford to eat fruits whenever she desired. It wasn't until she was 28 and pregnant with me that she finally had the luxury of doing so.
Now, as I have spent most of my day slaving over applications, worrying about whether or not McKinsey & Company will like my application and how in the world I can get through the interview process, I can't help but compare my current preoccupations and desires to the greatest wishes expressed by my grandfather and my mother once upon a time.

I can't help but think now that I have all the material comforts I need in the world, why am I still striving to work for these highly stressful and highly competitive industries that promise high monetary returns? For my grandfather, he would be wealthy to his heart's content if he could just be full after every meal. For my mom, wealth and success was the ability to afford all types of food. But what will define wealth and success for us? Without even trying, I now live with conditions that were once my grandpa and my mom's greatest dream in life. What will my dream be?