Success vs Happiness: Do You Have to Choose?

The Common Assumption

The most common implicit model of success and happiness goes like this: work hard, achieve your goals, and happiness will follow as the reward. Get the promotion, earn the income, build the company, achieve the status — and then you will be happy. This model is so deeply embedded in Western culture that it rarely gets examined. It structures how we design careers, how we parent children, how we define life success, and what we tell ourselves we are sacrificing for. It is also, according to a substantial body of psychological research, largely wrong.

The assumption treats happiness as a downstream consequence of success — something you earn after you arrive. But this sequence creates a fundamental problem: if happiness is always contingent on the next achievement, it is permanently deferred. There is always a next goal. The promised arrival point never quite arrives. People who operate from this assumption often describe a recurring disappointment — reaching a long-sought goal, feeling a brief flush of satisfaction, then discovering that the next level of the same goal has already taken its place as the new condition for happiness. The horizon keeps moving.

Ancient philosophy had a name for this error. The Stoics called it placing your happiness in "preferred indifferents" — external things that are nice to have but not constitutive of the good life. Epictetus was blunt: "Seek not that the things which happen should happen as you wish; but wish the things which happen to be as they are, and you will have a tranquil flow of life." This is not passivity — it is a reorientation of the source of well-being from external circumstances to internal character and orientation.

What Research Shows

The positive psychology revolution, launched by Martin Seligman and colleagues in the late 1990s, systematically investigated what actually produces human flourishing rather than simply what treats pathology. One of its most important and counterintuitive findings was that the causal arrow between happiness and success often runs in the opposite direction from what most people assume. Sonja Lyubomirsky, reviewing over 200 cross-sectional, longitudinal, and experimental studies, concluded that "happy individuals are predisposed to seek out and undertake new goals and are likely to be successful when they pursue these goals." Happiness is not just the reward for success — it is a driver of it.

Barbara Fredrickson's broaden-and-build theory provides the mechanism. Positive emotions — joy, curiosity, gratitude, serenity — broaden people's momentary thought-action repertoires, making them more creative, more open to new information, better at problem-solving, and more willing to invest in social relationships. These broadened capabilities then build lasting personal resources — skills, resilience, social capital — that produce better performance and more success over time. Negative emotions, by contrast, narrow focus to immediate threats and deplete these same resources. This means that investing in your own well-being is not selfishness or distraction from achievement — it is a performance strategy.

Research on intrinsic versus extrinsic motivation adds another layer of complexity. Edward Deci and Richard Ryan's self-determination theory distinguishes between goals pursued because they are inherently meaningful and enjoyable (intrinsic) versus goals pursued for external rewards, approval, or to avoid punishment (extrinsic). Intrinsically motivated goals produce higher quality work, greater persistence, and more durable satisfaction when achieved. Extrinsic goals, even when achieved, often leave a sense of emptiness — because the victory does not feed the parts of the self that actually need nourishment.

Hedonic Adaptation

The primary psychological mechanism that explains why success does not reliably produce lasting happiness is hedonic adaptation — the process by which people rapidly adjust to new circumstances, returning to a relatively stable baseline level of well-being. Philip Brickman and Donald Campbell coined the term "hedonic treadmill" in 1971 to describe this phenomenon: as you achieve new levels of success, your standards and expectations adjust to match, leaving you at roughly the same place relative to your aspirations as before. You are running hard but not moving forward in well-being terms.

The empirical evidence for hedonic adaptation is robust. Brickman's classic 1978 study compared lottery winners with paraplegics and found that both groups showed significant return toward their pre-event baseline happiness within months. More recent research has found that while some life events produce permanent hedonic shifts (notably marriage shows a temporary boost that fades, while persistent unemployment shows lasting negative effects), most positive achievements produce only temporary well-being increases. Promotions, salary raises, and status achievements are particularly subject to rapid adaptation.

The treadmill is not equally powerful for all experiences, however. Research by Leaf Van Boven and Thomas Gilovich found that experiences produce more durable happiness than material possessions — in part because experiences resist comparison (you cannot compare memories as precisely as bank balances), are more central to identity, and are more easily recalled in positive terms over time. This suggests a practical strategy: invest in experiences, relationships, and growth rather than in status symbols and possessions if lasting well-being is the goal.

Meaning vs Pleasure

Psychologists distinguish between two fundamental orientations to well-being. The hedonic orientation pursues positive feelings, pleasure, and the absence of pain — what Aristotle called the life of pleasure (bios apolaustikos). The eudaimonic orientation pursues meaning, engagement, growth, and contribution — what Aristotle called the flourishing life (eudaimonia). These are not simply different paths to the same destination; they produce qualitatively different kinds of well-being with different long-term consequences.

Research by Carol Ryff and colleagues found that eudaimonic well-being — measured by purpose in life, personal growth, autonomy, positive relationships, and environmental mastery — predicts physical health outcomes more strongly than hedonic well-being (positive affect and life satisfaction). People high in eudaimonic well-being show better immune function, lower cortisol levels, more healthy sleep patterns, and lower rates of depression and anxiety. Meaning, in other words, is not just psychologically rewarding — it is biologically protective.

Viktor Frankl's logotherapy, developed from his experiences surviving Nazi concentration camps, provides the most extreme test of this principle. Frankl observed that prisoners who maintained a sense of meaning — a reason to survive, a relationship to return to, a work to complete — showed markedly better psychological and physical resilience than those who had lost meaning, regardless of their objective circumstances. His conclusion, that the primary human drive is not pleasure but meaning, aligns remarkably well with subsequent empirical research. Success that is meaningful — that connects to your deepest values and contributions — produces a qualitatively different well-being than success that is merely impressive.

Integrating Both

The most sophisticated answer to the success-happiness question is not "choose one" but "redesign your definition of success so that it includes well-being as a component rather than treating happiness as a downstream consequence." This is what positive psychology researchers call the PERMA model (Seligman's framework): Positive emotions, Engagement, Relationships, Meaning, and Accomplishment — all together constitute flourishing. Achievement (Accomplishment) is one component of the good life, not the whole of it and not the cause of the rest.

Research on flow states by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi offers a compelling vision of what integrated success-happiness looks like in practice. Flow — the state of complete absorption in a challenging and meaningful activity — produces simultaneous reports of high performance and deep satisfaction. Flow is not pleasure exactly; people in flow states are often too absorbed to notice enjoyment in the moment. But retrospectively they describe flow experiences as among the most meaningful and satisfying of their lives. Designing work and creative pursuits to produce frequent flow experiences may be the most effective strategy for integrating success and well-being.

The philosopher Alan Watts observed that Western culture creates suffering by teaching people to treat every present moment as a means to a future end — always doing now for the sake of what comes later. The result is a life spent almost entirely in preparation for a happiness that never quite arrives. Watts' alternative, drawn from Zen Buddhism, is not to abandon goals but to find a way of pursuing them that is itself satisfying — to play the game for the love of playing, not only for the score. This is, remarkably, also what the best performance research suggests: intrinsic engagement with the process, rather than fixation on outcomes, produces both better performance and greater well-being.

How to Apply These Insights

Warnings

Frequently Asked Questions