Should we pursue happiness or success?

Throughout my life, I thought happiness could be achieved after I reached a certain station of success. Even when striving so hard for success that it robs me of my happiness in the moment, I thought it was worthy to sacrifice happiness at the altar of success. Even when things other than the pursuit of success brought me happiness, I chose to diminish their importance and prioritise the pursuit of success. In the end, I was neither happy nor did I achieve the station of success I was chasing. What went wrong?

Perhaps I put the cart before the horse. I always saw success as the means to an end, with the end state being happiness. But what if this lens through which I viewed my goals was the reason my life played out like a bad Bollywood movie on repeat. What if happiness was the means to an end, with the end state being success? Stay with me as I unpack and then attack this statement.

Consider the everyday choices that stitch together the fabric of our lives, the biggest one being, how we choose to spend our time. From the moment we wake up, especially in these Covid times, we make micro-decisions. Should we indulge in a morning routine — where we take a walk, pray/meditate, break fast — or do we dive right into work and count the blessing of not having a commute while we work from home? Should we take a break during the day and call a friend/have a lazy lunch or keep going a mile a minute at work?

The lazy joy of happiness becomes hard work when we’re so hard at work. To slow down and enjoy the moment — savour the happiness of our health, family, friends, little indulgences — appears to conflict with the time we could invest in the pursuit of success. The irony is that without taking these moments to feel joy and decompress, one has no fuel or mental energy to pursue success at their peak. But if one is constantly self-critical in these moments of joy, worrying about taking time away from the pursuit of success, then one is really operating in the worst of both worlds.

Shouldn’t happiness trump success anyways? Why do we pursue success if it causes us so much heart ache? The easy answers to this is that we pursue success because it’s how we’re wired personally (type A personality) or because of how we’re socialised. A marginally deeper answer is that we want to be successful to prove to others that we are better than them. A slightly deeper thought is that we want to prove to ourselves that we are better than others by proving to others that we are better than them. Another tangent is that we just want to be loved and respected. Success is an easy shortcut to securing the love and respect of others.

In my case, I over-compensate for my insecurities by trying to pursue success. If I’m successful, people will love and respect me. But this is such a narrow, fearful expression of my human potential. On the flip side, I believe God has blessed me with certain gifts that I want to use in service of humanity and my country. My core purpose then is to be in service of society rather than pursuing stations of success. I can pursue this purpose without the crushing pressure of a deadline, while being happy along the way. But I don’t give myself the licence to do so. I must fight this impulse as it’s unhealthy but where do I start?

I guess a good start is to be kind to myself. Building an everyday routine that prioritises happiness first will automatically fuel success as it creates mental bandwidth versus eating it. Next, it’s important to ask myself uncomfortable questions about why I want to pursue success on a deadline and what is the real purpose of my life. It’s amazing how much we worry about so little in the grander scheme of things. How fast we run in the race of the day to day life without stopping to ask deeper questions about why we’re running in the first place and what we’re running away from.

Published in The Express Tribune, September 20^th, 2020.

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