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September 17 - October 3, 2022
the success addict is never “successful enough.” The high only lasts a day or two, and then it’s on to the next success hit. “Unhappy is he who depends on success to be happy,” wrote Alex Dias Ribeiro, a former famous Formula 1 race car driver.
Pride is sneaky: it hides inside good things. Saint Augustine astutely observed that “every other kind of sin has to do with the commission of evil deeds, whereas pride lurks even in good works in order to destroy them.”
Fear animates all success addicts. As philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote in his Confessions, “I was not afraid of punishment, I was only afraid of disgrace; and that I feared more than death, more than crime, more than anything else in the world.”
“Wealth is like sea-water; the more we drink, the thirstier we become, and the same is true of fame”—that’s philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, writing in 1851, more than a century and half before social media was invented and made the whole problem ten times worse.
A musician of some renown once told me that getting and staying famous is a miserable combination of boredom and terror.
It is often believed that President Teddy Roosevelt called social comparison the “thief of joy.” Whether he said it or not, it’s true: researchers have long found that social comparison lowers our happiness.
just spend a few hours browsing Instagram and see how bad you feel about yourself. This is because you are comparing your success with your perception of others’ success, as depicted in information of dubious accuracy. Nothing good comes of this.
It does require an open admission of the truth, however, and a commitment to change: that what you have is a problem and you want to solve it, that what you have been doing isn’t working, and that you want to be happy. This is always the first step in recovery from an addiction, by the way.
In the West, success and happiness come—or so we believe—by avoiding losses and accumulating more stuff: more money, more accomplishments, more relationships, more experiences, more prestige, more followers, more possessions. Meanwhile, most Eastern philosophy warns that this acquisitiveness leads to materialism and vanity, which derails the search for happiness by obscuring one’s essential nature.
In the words of Lao Tzu, author of the Tao Te Ching, written in the fourth century BC, I shall overcome with the simplicity of original nature. With the simplicity of true nature, there shall be no desire. Without desire, one’s original nature will be at peace. And the world will naturally be in accord with the right Way.
For many readers who are successful but anxious, professional or social prestige is indeed a huge attachment. Thomas argues that these idols leave us dissatisfied because they are not what we need as complete persons.
Over the next several days, the truth emerged to Siddhartha—that release from suffering comes not from renunciation of the things of the world, but from release from attachment to those things. A Middle Way shunned both ascetic extremism and sensuous indulgence, because both are attachments and thus lead to dissatisfaction. At the moment of this realization, Siddhartha became the Buddha.
Noble Truth 1. Life is suffering (dukkha in Sanskrit), due to chronic dissatisfaction. Noble Truth 2. The cause of this suffering is craving, desire, and attachment for worldly things. Noble Truth 3. Suffering can be defeated by eliminating this craving, desire, and attachment. Noble Truth 4. The way to eliminate craving, desire, and attachment is by following the magga, the Noble Eightfold Path of Buddhism.
Note that neither Thomas nor the Buddha argued that there is something inherently evil about worldly rewards. In fact, they can be used for great good. Money is critical for a functioning society and supporting your family; power can be wielded to lift others up; pleasure leavens life;
We work ourselves to death to attain the elusive satisfaction; when the success curve starts to bend back down, the attachments give us tremendous suffering.
We know more or less how to meet our desire for satisfaction but are terrible at making it last. It’s almost as if our brains won’t let us enjoy anything for very long.
The joy that came to your caveman ancestor from finding a sweet berry on a bush couldn’t occupy him for very long, lest he be distracted from the threat of the tiger, for whom your ancestor would make a nice lunch.
After a while, you need constant success hits just not to feel like a failure. That’s what we social scientists refer to as the “hedonic treadmill.” You run and run but make no real progress toward your goal—you simply avoid being thrown off the back from stopping or slowing down.
According to evolutionary psychology, our tendency to strive for more, more, more is perfectly understandable. For most of history, the majority of humans were at the edge of starvation.
He wanted to find a mate and have kids, too. And what would make that possible? Not just having enough—no, he had to have more than the guy in the next cave over, which would make him a better prospect in the mating market.
We all know perfectly well that social comparison is ridiculous and harmful—we touched on it in the last chapter—and research backs this up. Scholars show that participating in “keeping up with the Joneses” creates anxiety and even depression.
That’s the insight that earned the Nobel Prize in Economics for Princeton University’s Daniel Kahneman, for work he did with Amos Tversky on prospect theory.[11] Prospect theory challenges the assumption that people are rational agents who assess gains and losses the same way; in fact, it asserts that people are much more affected emotionally by losing something than they are by gaining the same thing.
Once again, it makes perfect evolutionary sense. In a time when humans were always on the edge of starvation—most of human history for most of the world, before the industrial age began—a gain was nice, but a loss was potentially lethal.
It makes no sense in modern life to use our energies to have five cars, five bathrooms, or even five shirts, but we just . . . want them. Neuroscientists tell us why.[13] Dopamine—the neurotransmitter of pleasure behind nearly all addictive behaviors—is excreted in response to thoughts about buying new things, winning money, acquiring more power or notoriety, or, for that matter, having new sex partners.[14] The brain evolved to reward us for the behaviors that kept us alive and made it more likely to pass on our DNA.
Early on, when one has relatively little and a lot to prove, more worldly rewards can be temporarily satisfying, but as one ages, we start to realize that the satisfaction never lasts, and the realization of futility sets in.
To sum up, here are three formulas that explain both our impulses and the reason we can’t ever seem to achieve lasting satisfaction. Satisfaction = Continually getting what you want Success = Continually having more than others Failure = Having less
Or consider the entrepreneur Tony Hsieh, founder of the online retailing pioneer Zappos and author of the mega bestseller Delivering Happiness. He died in 2020 at the age of forty-six after a long period of drug abuse and other self-destructive behavior resulting in at least one 911 call in which he threatened self-harm.
Satisfaction = What you have ÷ what you want Your satisfaction is what you have, divided by what you want. Notice the difference from the earlier equations?
I have seen this a hundred times. Someone sees tremendous material success but feels less and less satisfied, the richer and more famous she gets. The Mercedes brings her less satisfaction at age fifty than the Chevy did at age thirty. Why? Because now she wants a Ferrari.
It means turning the treadmill off by managing our wants. In the words of the Spanish Catholic saint Josemaría Escrivá, “He has most who needs least. Don’t create needs for yourself.”
Consider this email I received from a successful fifty-year-old journalist. My best friend and I often ask each other, “Aren’t we going to regret we didn’t enjoy this time in our life more?” We agree that we will, and then we hang up the phone and go back to the madness. I don’t think anyone wants madness but we want nice houses and schools and vacations and organic food and college and church and sleepaway camp and then you become tied to your circumstances.
people don’t realize their unhealthy attachments in life until they suffer a loss or illness that makes the important things come into focus. Researchers have consistently found that most survivors of illness and loss experience post-traumatic growth. Indeed, cancer survivors tend to report higher happiness levels than demographically matched people who did not have cancer.
Making a list of the things you want is temporarily satisfying, because it stimulates dopamine, the neurotransmitter of desire, which is pleasurable. But it creates attachments, which create dissatisfaction as they grow.
I then think of the forces in this future life that are most responsible for this happiness: my faith; my family; my friendships; the work I am doing that is inherently satisfying, meaningful, and that serves others.
Satisfaction comes not from chasing bigger and bigger things, but paying attention to smaller and smaller things. Buddhist master Thich Nhat Hanh explains this in his book The Miracle of Mindfulness: “While washing the dishes, one should only be washing the dishes, which means that while washing the dishes one should be completely aware of the fact that one is washing the dishes.”[24] Why? If we are thinking about the past or future, “we are not alive during the time we are washing the dishes.”
We avoid thinking realistically about the length of our lives and our time left, lulling us into the false belief that we have all the time in the world. This expunges the urgency of life changes,
One of the most common strategies to avoid the agony of being forgotten is by trying to engineer a professional legacy. In my conversations for this book, many people in the end stages of their careers talked about how they wanted to be remembered. But it doesn’t work: they forget you. People move on.
In his book The Road to Character, the writer David Brooks (a friend, but no relation) distinguishes between “résumé virtues” and “eulogy virtues.”[10] Résumé virtues are professional and oriented toward earthly success. They require comparison with others. Eulogy virtues are ethical and spiritual and require no comparison.
According to Leo Tolstoy, “The worst thing about death is the fact that when a man is dead it is impossible any longer to undo the harm you have done him, or to do the good you haven’t done him. They say: live in such a way as to be always ready to die. I would say: live in such a way that anyone can die without you having anything to regret.”
This discipline helps us work on mindfulness—living in the present as opposed to the past or future—which studies consistently find leads us to be happier people. But it also helps us to make the decisions that truly expose our best selves.
Exposure therapy has been firmly established as the best way to take on fears and phobias.[12] The reason is what psychologists call “desensitization,” in which repeated exposure to something repellent or frightening makes it seems ordinary, prosaic, and certainly not scary.
Simply put, scarcity makes everything dearer to us. Remembering that life won’t last forever makes us enjoy it all the more today.
In 1938, researchers at Harvard Medical School lit upon a crazy but visionary idea: They would sign up a bunch of men then studying at Harvard and follow them over their whole adult lives, until they died. They would question them every year along the way about their lifestyles, habits, relationships, work, and happiness.
researchers would be able to see how what people do early in life relates to how well—or poorly—they age.[4] And thus, the Harvard Study of Adult Development was born.
Harvard psychiatry professor George Vaillant, wrote three bestselling books on the results. His successor, psychiatry professor Robert Waldinger, popularized the study even more with a viral TED Talk, “What Makes a Good Life? Lessons from the Longest Study on Happiness,” which has been viewed nearly forty million times.
The best off were called “Happy-Well,” who enjoyed six dimensions of good physical health, as well as good mental health and high life satisfaction. On the very other end of the spectrum were the “Sad-Sick,” who were below average in physical health, mental health, and life satisfaction.[5]
There are seven big predictors of being Happy-Well that we can control pretty directly:[6] 1. Smoking. Simple: don’t smoke—or at least, quit early. 2. Drinking. Alcohol abuse is one of the most obvious factors in the Grant Study leading to Sad-Sick
Healthy body weight. Avoid obesity.
Exercise. Stay physically active,
Adaptive coping style. That means confronting problems directly, appraising them honestly, and dealing with them directly without excessive rumination,
