Why are people wealthy, successful and miserable?
This week, the New York Times released a special magazine feature on The Future of Work, and one of the articles within the feature was titled America's Professional Elite: Wealthy, Successful, and Miserable by Charles Duhigg.
It’s definitely worth reading, but I’ll quickly summarize it here for you.
Charles Duhigg describes going to his Harvard Business School reunion, fifteen years after graduating, and encountering his former classmates, many of whom are highly successful and acclaimed individuals. They are, with few exceptions, deeply unhappy.
He shares the example of a man who makes $1.2 million a year in a job that he hates, finds incredibly stressful and meaningless, and can’t figure out how to escape:
It reminds me of that stellar line from Zig Ziglar: “Money won’t make you happy, but everyone wants to find out for themselves.”
Obviously, this $1.2 million dollar man needs to get some perspective. He got what he wanted and it turned out to not really be what he wanted, but that pain does not compare to the type of suffering that hundreds of millions of people experience every day. However, I believe his story holds a clue to some of what ails us in Western society: if we can explore why he ended up where he is, perhaps we can educate and inspire people to avoid it and to spend their working lives in pursuit of something else.
After exploring the potential causes behind this phenomenon, Duhigg eventually ends by saying that a job is usually more than just a means to a paycheck - it’s also a source of purpose and meaning, a place to belong in a world, and an opportunity to contribute what brings you alive to benefit someone else.
I’m so grateful this article is getting a lot of attention, because I have been beating this drum for years and years.
Work, in its peak expression, is a chance to give your internal treasures to others and to grow as a person while simultaneously contributing to the well-being of others.
Work has so much potential to change the world and change us as individuals, which is articulated in two of my favorite quotes:
“Work is love made visible.” - Kahlil Gibran
“Work is the place where the self meets the world... the inside made into the outside... with the right work, the right relationship to that work, and the mystery of what is continually being revealed to us through our endeavors, we find a home in the world.” - David Whyte
Many of us feel this potential for work, and we strive to fulfill it as a pathway towards self-development and to contribute to others — for work has the power to do both, creating win-wins for individuals and for society. And the pursuit of career fulfillment and achievement can deeply contribute to well-being (more on that below), but the pursuit of success, money, power will absolutely not.
This is why I founded my organization The New Happy: to help people to learn that being successful or looking for things outside of you will not make you happy, and also, that a world that tells us that the path to happiness is individual success is a harmful one, both to that person and to the many causes and communities we could be serving along the way.
Unfortunately, the state of work in the United States is abysmal. If the first level purpose of work is to provide people with economic opportunity, is is failing: 40% of Americans don’t have money to cover an unexpected $400 dollar expense, 40 million people in the US live in poverty, and 95 million people live in near poverty. Americans work 50% more than people in Germany, France, and Italy, and we’ve also surpassed Sweden, Norway, the Netherlands, Finland, Switzerland, Austria, Britain, and Japan. Americans have no federal paid parental leave - the only industrialized nation in the world who doesn’t.
For those people who are lucky enough to have ‘good jobs’, the ones that offer some stability and cover health insurance, they tend to experience the next level of problems: a crisis of meaning. 70% of people are dissatisfied at work, with 60% of employees saying that work has a harmful effect on their well-being. 90% of employees would take a large pay cut to have more meaningful work.
Furthermore, work demands are only accelerating: since the 1970s, the average American added 200 more hours of work to their year, which equals a whole extra month of work. Nearly a quarter of Americans have no paid vacation, and for those of us who do, fifty seven percent of us don’t take all of our time.
How on earth did we end up so lost?
And what can we do about it?
Why is this belief pervasive?
The people we are talking about, both in this article and most of us reading who have the freedom to choose our career paths, are among the most privileged people walking the earth. These problems he and we face are real and important, but it’s also worth acknowledging that they are not at all like the problems impacting our fellow humans who are struggling to put food on the table, pay for medical expenses, navigate housing insecurity, deal with illness, or battle discrimination.
And to me, that is kind of the big point that everyone keeps missing in these conversations.
The people at the top of the economic pyramid and those of us who have been lucky enough to have choice in our careers - we are the ones who need to take a good, hard look at ourselves and what we are doing with our lives; for the reason we are experiencing a crisis of meaninglessness is because we are forgetting about our fellow humans who need us to build systems and programs and opportunities that lift them up and support them and bring them more freedom.
They’re directly connected!
If the $1.2 million dollar man was reading this, I’d ask him why he isn’t turning outward to serve other people when faced with his crisis of meaninglessness. And he’d probably tell me the truth, and it would show how far we have all been led astray: that he didn’t know that that was the solution to his pain.
After he’s gone out and helped people for a few weeks, using some of his amazing gifts and talents (maybe he teaches people how to manage their money, or donates his old suits to CareerGear, or mentors first-gen college students who are trying to get into finance, or any other million ways he could give), I’d be willing to bet that he’s found more meaning in his life, and that he’s become happier.
I believe that those of us who are lucky and privileged have an absolute moral duty and responsibility to serve other people. Full stop.
And isn’t it wonderful that a side benefit of that effort is to experience meaning in our lives?
You cannot have meaning by fulfilling your own needs. You can only get it from serving others.
Helping others leads to meaning, which leads to happiness, which leads to a successful life. That’s also how we make the world a better place.
Part of the abysmal work situation we have today has come from forgetting this truth and believing the story that society tells us, that the path to happiness is seeking out our own individual success as a primary goal.
Aristotle wrote that happiness was the aim of all human life, our central concern. Because we place so much importance upon it, we take the advice and stories and messages we hear very seriously, for we’re desperately hoping that someone can help us to achieve it.
Western society, culture, and institutions like schools and companies tell us, over and over again, that the path to happiness is to fulfill your own needs through achievement.
Most of us attend schools where we are taught to do whatever it takes to achieve a good grade, so that we can then progress to the next level. We are taught that to achieve tasks is to be good and important and worthy. Once we’ve climbed the levels of school, we jump into the next set of levels at university, and then again in the adult world. Eventually, we think we’ll get to the top level where everything will be fantastic. That's what happened to our $1.2 million dollar man.
But no one teaches you how to be happy along the way.
Duhigg points to a fascinating trend he notices in his former business-school classmates who did end up becoming happy and successful: they failed at first or had to take alternate routes than they had expected:
They tended to be the also-rans of the class, the ones who failed to get the jobs they wanted when they graduated. They had been passed over by McKinsey & Company and Google, Goldman Sachs and Apple, the big venture-capital firms and prestigious investment houses. Instead, they were forced to scramble for work — and thus to grapple, earlier in their careers, with the trade-offs that life inevitably demands. These late bloomers seemed to have learned the lessons about workplace meaning preached by people like Barry Schwartz. It wasn’t that their workplaces were enlightened or (as far as I could tell) that H.B.S. had taught them anything special. Rather, they had learned from their own setbacks. And often they wound up richer, more powerful and more content than everyone else.
These people had to learn the hard lesson up front: that there is no long-term, sustainable happiness to be found in leveling up for the mere purpose of leveling up.
These people had to find a way to move forward when they were cast out of the rat race, and in the process, likely figured out what was most meaningful to them, what their strengths were, or what they actually wanted to do. Duhigg includes himself in this group, saying that his many rejections also spurred him to find his passion for writing, which he has turned into a very successful career.
I think that’s why we hear tons of successful people talking about how not getting what they wanted was an enormous stroke of luck - it forced them to figure out their truth and find a way to live it.
It’s really easy to just stay in the rat race and keep leveling up, because every single part of society encourages you to do so. To reject it takes courage, or isolation, or loss, or rejection, or being an outsider, or having a cause, or having powerful role models, or being surrounded by a supportive community.
To live a good life, we have to consciously investigate our purpose and how we find meaning in life, and find the courage to pursue it in small ways. Otherwise, we’ll settle for the quick hits of feel-good moments that come from achieving an external success, which very quickly fade away, leaving us to just set our sights on the next one. Level up.
These people who struggled more up front had to figure out what they loved, what they wanted to do, what their particular gifts were, and then find a way to bring them to life. That’s not an easy process, and their short-term happiness probably took a hit during that time. But in the end, it led to long-term happiness.
Long-term happiness comes from experiencing meaning, and meaning comes from giving to other people. Without meaning, you can be happy when things go your way — but you will not thrive, no matter what happens to you.
What can we do about it?
“Those only are happy who have their minds fixed on some object other than their own happiness.” - John Stuart Mill
There are so many pathways towards constructing a more meaningful life. I’ll share a few ideas I have with you today in case you’re inspired to put any into action. When in doubt, remember to focus on serving others.
The most important thing we need to do is to change the systems of our society to be more supportive towards and encouraging of well-being. Businesses, government, health care, social services, and many other systems have to go through a major transformation.
That’s why The New Happy is a movement: we need to work together and within our respective areas of influence to drive change the optimizes for the well-being of all humans, rather than just for our own well-being. (If you are currently working on this, please reach out so I can learn about your incredible efforts and support you!) We can’t keep putting the demand on the employee or the human to change.
That being said, we do have the power to change ourselves, while we work on doing the long-term work of changing systems.
Here are a few ideas:
Satisfy the three human needs at work
Once security and safety are satisfied, ensure you’re taking care of the other needs of the people who work for you or with you. Humans have three basic needs for thriving, according to self-determination theory: competence, connection, and autonomy. You can make work better for people just by ensuring that they feel that they are good at what they do (and are always learning); helping them to connect with colleagues, clients, and beneficiaries of their work; and giving them the freedom to do things the way they want to.
And always connect it to who or what they are serving for meaning.
Reframe your work and craft your job
Most jobs lead to some sort of benefit for another human being. One classic study looked at hospital janitors who viewed their work as a calling:
“They began conducting interviews and found that, by design and habit, some members of the janitorial staff saw their jobs not as just tidying up but as a form of healing. One woman, for instance, mopped rooms inside a brain-injury unit where many residents were comatose. The woman’s duties were basic: change bedpans, pick up trash. But she also sometimes took the initiative to swap around the pictures on the walls, because she believed a subtle stimulation change in the unconscious patients’ environment might speed their recovery. She talked to other convalescents about their lives. “I enjoy entertaining the patients,” she told the researchers. “That is not really part of my job description, but I like putting on a show for them.” She would dance around, tell jokes to families sitting vigil at bedsides, try to cheer up or distract everyone from the pain and uncertainty that otherwise surrounded them.”
Who benefits from your work? Speak to them.
Who needs your work to survive or thrive? Think about them.
Can you reframe your job as a pathway towards helping people through solving problems? This is a technique called job crafting. You can learn how to do it for yourself or your team through this article. In studying it at Google, researchers found that employees were significantly happier and more effective six weeks later, based on both their manager and peer ratings.
Figure out your character strengths
Aristotle viewed the aim of human life to be ‘excellent’ at being our unique selves, and that the good life was the one where you develop your strengths to their highest expression to realize your highest potential.
Figure out your strengths and use them every day as often as you can.
Character strengths were designed by psychology researchers to identify the goodness within human beings so that we can measure, amplify, and cultivate it. This led to the identification of 24 character strengths within the categories of 6 virtues: wisdom, courage, humanity, justice, temperance, and transcendence.
The character strengths are pathways towards both feeling good and doing well in the world. It’s imperative that you find out what yours are and use them every day in every way you can. I’ve coached hundreds of people in using their strengths, and the results are usually transformational. You can take the assessment here.
Once you take the assessment, look at your top 5-7 strengths and try to figure out which of them are signature strengths. You can ask yourself which ones evoke...
a sense of ownership and authenticity?
a feeling of excitement?
a rapid learning curve?
continuous learning of new ways to enact it?
invigoration rather than exhaustion?
the creation and pursuit of projects that revolve around it?
intrinsic motivation to use it?
Use those questions to identify your top 3-5 signature strengths, which you should strive to use every day.
For example, my signature strengths are: Love of Learning, Creativity, Perspective, Spirituality, and Hope. I color-code my calendar by activities that use those strengths to keep them top of mind.
The statistics on using your strengths are compelling, too:
Employees who were highly aware of their strengths were 9 times more likelyto experience happiness at work and in life than those who were not aware of their strengths.
Employees who report a high amount of strengths use were 18 times more likely to flourish than those who report that they use their strengths least.
If your manager focuses on your strengths, you have just a 1 in 100 chance of being disengaged.
Using your signature strengths makes you lastingly happier – when 577 volunteers chose a signature strength and used it in a new way every day for a week, they were significantly happier and less depressed, even six months later.
I never feel more alive than when I’m using my strengths to serve others.
If you’re having trouble with finding or applying your strengths, there are tons of fantastic coaches out there who can help. Feel free to reach out and I’m happy to help you find someone who is a great fit for you.
Know Our Nature
Human beings are wired to pursue short-term pleasures and to fulfill our own needs. That’s important for our survival. Once we have satisfied our needs, we have to train ourselves to shift our focus towards other people. It will take time and effort, and taking care of yourself will also help you to serve others.
We’re also wired to set goals, so set goals that come from within (not imposed upon you from society), that are intrinsic to who you are and that benefit other people. Success is not inherently bad, and can be a very powerful way to change the world. Just make sure you’re enjoying the journey, as most of the pleasure in achieving goals comes along the way rather than at the end. Seek out joy along the way. Teach yourself the skill of happiness as a way of being, rather than an outcome.
As much as we’re wired to satisfy our own needs, we’re also wired to serve others. The activities and mental models I’ve laid out here are designed to help you to cultivate and strengthen that part of ourselves, which will serve you both in changing the world and making yourself happy.
I hope this was helpful and thought-provoking. Why do you think people are wealthy, successful, and miserable? What can we do about it? What are you doing to solve it? Reach out and let me know - I’d love to hear from you!