Happiness vs. Success

Often times in life society measures happiness on a scale of how “successful” someone is: how many cars they have, how much their job pays, how big their house is. However, there is one major flaw in this argument; neither happiness nor success can really be defined. In fact, in my opinion they are dependent on each other. You do not need cars, or money, or big houses to be successful or happy.

As we discussed in class, happiness can really be boiled down to cultivating meaningful relationships, and meaningful goals with an authenticity in each. If we surround ourselves with family and friends that genuinely care about us, it is impossible not to be positively affected by their presence. Similarly, as long as we are working toward goals that we have a passion for and not toward expectations others have of us, then we are thus making ourselves happy. There is no reason to do something as a means to an end because in reality there is never an end; it is the middle that really matters. We spend out whole lives working toward the next “step” when we could just be enjoying what we already have. At some point we need to realize that what we are looking for doesn’t exist, and instead we need to work toward whatever it is that we know makes us happy, not what we think (and society tells us) will make us happy.

Once we acknowledge what makes us happy, and we go after it, that is what defines success. To me, it is clear that happiness and success go hand in hand. You can neither define success nor happiness because they are contingent upon each other. You need to be happy to be successful, and you need to be successful to be happy. This is where the ambiguity comes in: we each find happiness and success in different things, so there are a number of valid ways to define each.