Why Do We Aim For Success Over Happiness?
Clearly, success is subjective. Success, in a nutshell, is achieving what you set your mind to. What is deemed successful fluctuates according to place, culture, and time. What is interesting, however, and underpins most of our social attitudes, is that to be truly successful one must also be wealthy. In 2019 the Spectrem Group asked millennials how they defined success; 70% of participants defined success as being financially stable. A report from Morning Consult of the same year found that Gen Z adults between 18 and 21 prioritise having a successful career and making money over having close friendships or getting married. Evidently, many people consider success to be a career that pays well enough to allow them to be financially comfortable. In an increasingly digital and individualistic society, flaunting our successes has become the norm. The presentation of success on Instagram is more often than not the presentation of a healthy bank balance and/or cultural capital. We are so used to consuming other people’s luxurious lifestyles on Instagram – whether it be an ever-expanding wardrobe, travelling the globe, or owning the latest technologies – that we do not question the ways we implicitly correlate success with the performance of decadence.
Does success make us happy? If success is increasingly viewed as being financially comfortable, achieving financial success should make us happy. No? Most of us know people (publicly or personally) who are both ‘successful’ and deeply unhappy. Happiness is a positive emotional state, characterised by feelings of contentment, joy, and life satisfaction. Our emotional worlds exist in a state of flux, and so the idea of ‘achieving’ happiness is a bit problematic. Happiness is not a fixed state of being, it comes and goes. Happiness is difficult to define, but it is fair to say that we are more likely to experience happiness if all aspects of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs are achieved in our lives. These needs range from physiological to self-actualisation and include our human need to love and belong. A successful career that gives us more capital can improve our quality of life and give us access to things more likely to promote happiness. But, if our need for friendship, intimacy, family, and a sense of connection are not met, we will continue to be ‘successful’ without being happy. So why do we aim for success over happiness?
Most of us have been indoctrinated to define our self-worth by our labour. Whether we admit it or not, we view ourselves as the sum of our parts. Good grades give us higher qualifications, which make it more likely for us to find well-paying careers. Our ability to productively invest in our labour (generally speaking) rewards us with promotions – with more pay comes more responsibility. Access to greater wealth changes our lifestyles, and it is common to then seek higher paying jobs as a means of maintaining our increasingly indulgent lifestyles. So, the cycle goes. We are taught to aim for continuous growth in our professional lives and to desire decadence. As a result, we are a culture constantly shifting the goal post, celebrating our ‘successes’ briefly before aspiring to the next big thing. It can be easy to conclude that our cultural era is defined by greed, but there are valid reasons for us defining our success by the financial rewards we reap from our labour.
A large portion of our salaries are spent covering our basic needs – food, shelter, and clothing. House prices have gone up by over 285% since 1999, whilst average wages have only increased by 27% in the same amount of time. With home ownership being a cultural marker of success, we are having to work harder, longer, or smarter to achieve our dreams of owning property. Those of us who don’t aspire to home ownership still commit a large portion of our earnings to covering our basic needs. According to the 2021 annual report from money.co.uk, average living costs are set to rise by about 10% per home. The cost of living is rising exponentially whilst wage growth is weak. We cannot forget that between 2010 and 2020, the Conservative Party under David Cameron sold us austerity as a means of responding to the financial crisis of 2008. As a result of austerity, the public realm employs a smaller population of the workforce than at any time since 1945. Youth services and social care have been hit the hardest, disproportionately harming the youngest and poorest. It is no coincidence that ‘violent youth crime’ is most prevalent in areas with higher levels of deprivation. The poverty in the United Kingdom cannot be overstated. Child poverty has soared to its highest since the Second World War. Austerity has locked many people in the vicious cycle of a decreasingly supportive welfare state. It is no surprise that all of this has resulted in our current era of ‘Hustle/Grind Culture’. Satisfying our basic needs costs more now than ever before. Having multiple streams of income has become the norm. We are coerced into exploiting our labour if we want to simply survive, let alone if we desire the materialistic things we equate with success.
As people living in Great Britain, we are the direct or indirect beneficiaries of violent colonialism. We reap the trickled-down rewards of a national investment in theft. We accumulate personal wealth through a system that found its success and fortunes through dispossessing much of the rest of the world of its resources, people, and cultures. Britain is the 23rd richest country on earth [according to the World Bank], maintaining its wealth and legacy through the ongoing hoarding of the world’s resources. Speaking generally, some of our cultural markers of success require our complicity in this hoarding of resources. Considering our national wealth, it is shocking that poverty is so prevalent in our society. It is even worse that those forced to lean on the welfare state in order to survive are judged so harshly, with phrases like ‘Benefit Britain’ harbouring such negative connotations. According to Insider, Queen Elizabeth II’s net worth is over £340 million. The Sovereign Grant that pays for the Royal Family’s travel, palace upkeep, and utilities (amongst other things) comes from taxpayers’ money. In return for the Sovereign Grant, all profits made from The Crown Estate are surrendered to the government. Prominent members of the Royal Family work, on average, 84.5 days of the year [1/3rd of the working days in the UK], whilst the Queen owns around 1/6th of the land on the planet(!). Those who are dependent on the welfare state are made to feel like freeloaders when (if anyone) the freeloaders of this nation are The Crown. They continue to reap the rewards of colonisation and hoard the world’s wealth, even as poverty in the UK (and globally) is on the rise.
Everyone is coerced in varying degrees into exploiting themselves to achieve success. Yet, sex workers in particular are met with the harshest judgement for the ways in which they choose to capitalise on this. It is ~interesting~ that exploitation as a means of achieving success is most critically interrogated and punished when those who are not cis-gendered men capitalise on their desirability and sexual agency. It is ~interesting~ that exploitation and transactional relationships are culturally sanctioned when the exploited are seemingly unaware of the exploitation inherent to the transactional systems we are all enrolled in.
The harsh reality is that financial stability is becoming increasingly unattainable. Success within the framework of capitalism is defined by its exclusivity. Under capitalism, people are separated into the ‘haves’ and ‘have nots’ – the more you have, the more successful you are considered to be. In a culture where many aspire to achieve things reserved for the select few, it is no surprise that so many people are unhappy. It makes sense, then, that some people are interrogating what success and happiness means to them. Many of the people who pursue ‘happiness’ over ‘success’ do so because they cannot afford to prioritise success under capitalism. The UK ranks first in the world for the most expensive childcare, with the net cost of childcare being 55% of average earnings. Many with childcare responsibilities have to prioritise their basic and psychological needs over their desires of achieving success in their careers. Others may pursue ‘happiness’ over ‘success’ for reasons including but not limited to: physical or mental ill-health; neurodivergence; disabilities; caring responsibilities; and the need to protect individual and collective wellbeing. When speaking of mental health being a barrier to achieving success under capitalism, it is important to remember that mental health is not solely anxiety and depression. People who experience psychosis, suicidal ideation, schizophrenia, manic depressive disorder etc. find that the mediums of achieving success under capitalism are less likely to provide adequate care for them and their needs. Often, those who prioritise things outside of high earning careers are made to feel as though their labour is inferior or of lesser value.
Success and happiness are subjective, so it is natural that people invest their time and energy into a variety of things to achieve their goals. When we judge other people for the ways they choose to live, we wade into dangerous territory. At the same time, it is the responsible thing to reassert that (despite our Age of Individualism) we are a global community whose lives are directly or indirectly interrelated – more now than ever. When our ideas of success can only be achieved through the dispossession or exploitation of others, it is necessary to redefine what success means. When our ideas of happiness can only be achieved through overindulgence, we run the risk of prioritising greed above all else. It often feels as though we desire success over happiness because happiness is much more complex to attain, and even then, happiness is fleeting.
There has been increased visibility of people prioritising their happiness over their perceived success. Simone Biles and Naomi Osaka both withdrew from sporting competitions to protect their mental health. As with any time anyone prioritises their individual wellbeing over society’s expectations of their labour, both Biles and Osaka were met with fierce judgement by critics. These critics were unable or unwilling to view the women as human beings within their own right. Most of the criticism received by people pursuing happiness (or the alleviation of pain) over culturally sanctioned success is rooted in an inability to view human lives as more than the productive output of our labour.
The Nap Ministry spoke on Twitter about how Biles’ and Osaka’s decision to prioritise their wellbeing is not unique. The Nap Ministry wrote “Black folks have been saying hell no and deuces to the violence of Grind Culture. We’ve been subversive in finding temporary spaces of rest and joy in order to thrive in a place that wants to kill us. A politics of refusal.” Whilst anyone can subscribe to a policy of refusal, it is particularly poignant when Black women – who have been disproportionately exploited for our labour (in all senses of the word) – choose to exist outside of the confines of Grind Culture. It is useful to recognise that subscribing to a policy of refusal involves having enough privilege to choose to refuse, or the resilience to withstand the repercussions of refusal.
Imagine if our collective consciousness prioritised community, safety, and a sense of belonging over individual success? Imagine if the individuals and organisations who possess a disproportionate amount of the world’s wealth did not prioritise their individual success? Imagine if those who work less in order to focus on their spiritual, physical, and mental wellbeing could be the norm and not the exception? More people would have the choice to pursue their own happiness, and we would be living in a very different world.
Written by Adwoa Owusu-Barnieh
Adwoa is a 22-year-old ex-Greater-Londoner, currently calling Birmingham home. She studied Classical Literature & Civilisation at the University of Birmingham. Adwoa is perpetually preoccupied with the limitations of language and knowledge when it comes to understanding the human condition and – ironically – commits a lot of time and language to expressing her knowledge (or lack thereof) of these things. Her aim is to curate space for more intentional modes of living, ritual, and understanding.
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