Success and Happiness in The Modern Word: What is More Important

In the modern world, the pressure to succeed is enormous. In fields as disparate as business and medicine, law and sales, there is a pervading pressure to be successful in one’s endeavours. It is not just the workplace that perpetuates the need for one to be successful, however. Advertisements sell a particular vision of what it means to be successful and how they’ll help people get there, and social media bombards its users with idealized notions about success and how it's achieved. The common theme among these different channels is, interestingly, that success is rarely defined, and instead is bandied around like a buzzword with a vague and nebulous meaning that doesn’t really have a productive purpose. The dictionary definition, supplied by Merriam Webster, incidentally does little to make defining success a more concrete concept, stating that success is a “favorable or desired outcome; the attainment of wealth, favor, or eminence”. The primary definition is fairly generic, but it’s the secondary definition that provides a far more interesting take on what it means to be successful. Clearly, success is synonymous with materialistic wealth or financial standing in society. Is that all there is to success? What we called nowadays 'success and happiness' is explained in the essay. 

Arguably, wealth isn’t the best indicator of what it means to be successful. Numerous studies have found that an inordinate focus on the acquisition of material wealth can have detrimental effects on a person’s interpersonal relationships, and has a link to a variety of mental illnesses and afflictions, like anxiety and depression. That’s not to say material wealth is absolutely meaningless to what it means to be successful: on the flip side, financial insecurity and its associated problems are also linked to a host of physical and psychological illnesses.

To entirely decouple finances from success would be unnecessarily extreme, but it does seem reasonable that a fair amount of separation should be created between the two concepts lest an unhealthy relationship forms. Instead, a more attainable, and ideal, connection would be success to fulfillment, and not necessarily to wealth. It could be argued this distinction solves no problems that the prior definitions created, but that would ignore the highly personal nature success has to an individual. In the current understanding, success’s definition is fairly narrow: a quick glance at anything from corporate messaging to social media posts make it abundantly clear that if you’re not constantly producing “value” or money, your time is being wasted.

This creates what’s often dubbed “FOMO,” or the “fear of missing out,” as one compares unrealistic images of success and happiness to what they experience on a daily basis, which often comes up short, leaving them feeling worse. This isn’t a theoretical effect: one study conducted at the University of Pennsylvania abstaining just one week from social media drastically reduced feelings of anxiety and FOMO compared to those who hadn’t altered their social media usage.

Income Rate Can't Be the Only Reason for Success and Happiness

Furthermore, it’s been shown in a few studies that income and happiness are positively correlated, but only up to a point, which is often quoted to be around $75,000 per annum. After that amount, happiness has no particular correlation to wealth, which can come as a surprise since so many people have met that criteria and persist in making more, convinced it will make them happier.

Clearly, money just isn’t that good of a marker of what most would call true success. Naturally, it may be difficult to avoid feeling envious of a coworker pulling in multiples of your salary, and certainly financial difficulties imposed by a lower income can feel very real, but after a certain point, a connection to what makes one satisfied to success is not only far more achievable than exorbitantly high dollar signs, but are likelier to improve one’s mental health and overall contentedness with their life.

While it’s not as mainstream as the connection of success to wealth, it’s becoming increasingly more common for people to forgo monetary compensation in exchange for work they feel is more personally satisfying. In fact, some studies have shown that people who reported higher levels of meaningfulness in their work were likely to turn down an offer for a higher paying job than those that reported a lack of meaningfulness in their work.

It isn’t just in the employee’s benefit to pursue success by associating it with meaningful work. Employers also benefit when their workers report higher feelings of job satisfaction. Average turnover reduces by 24%, which is a massive cost saver for many companies, especially in those with low margins, and productivity also increases. Encouraging people to redefine success, from a wealth-oriented one to a personal meaningful one, pays dividends to employers and employees alike.

Conclusion

The lure of money is strong, and the cultural associations made between what it means to be successful and accumulating wealth are just as solid. However, it’s been consistently shown that a money-centric approach to success disregards the human aspect of what it means to be successful. It may take time for a true redefinition to occur, but making the switch benefits everyone, employee to employer.

References

1. Kasser, T., & Ryan, R. M. (1993). A dark side of the American dream: Correlates of financial success as a central life aspiration. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 65(2), 410-422.

2. Furnham, A. (1984). Many sides of the coin: The psychology of money usage. Personality and Individual Differences, 5(5), 501-509.

3. Tang, T. L. P., & Gilbert, P. R. (1995). A cross-cultural comparison of the human desire for money. Social Indicators Research, 36(3), 239-257.

4. Diener, E., & Biswas-Diener, R. (2002). Will money increase subjective well-being? Social Indicators Research, 57(2), 119-169.

5. Dijksterhuis, A., & Nordgren, L. F. (2006). A theory of unconscious thought. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 1(2), 95-109.

6. Krueger, J. I., & Vohs, K. D. (2006). Why we retaliate: Negative reciprocity and the development of normative structures. Psychological Science, 17(11), 1006-1013.

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7. Kasser, T. (2002). The high price of materialism. MIT Press.