Why success can leave strivers unhappy

Strivers often enter into an unspoken social contract: if they do everything they are supposed to do, their effort will deliver happiness and meaning. Yet, as Arthur Brooks has observed, that promise is far from airtight. Success and happiness are not opposites, but achievement alone does not guarantee contentment.

The gap can appear even at the height of accomplishment. Brooks describes Olympians who experience a brief high after winning, followed by a sharp letdown. CEOs, too, may reach the top only to feel bitter. These examples challenge the belief that the next victory, promotion, or milestone will finally provide lasting satisfaction.

For strivers, the target can keep moving: meaning seems to sit one achievement away. Brooks says their “ancient brains” tell them that with enough, they will find the satisfaction they seek. But that logic can keep people chasing rewards without addressing what they deeply need. Reaching a summit may bring recognition or a moment of exhilaration; it does not necessarily resolve dissatisfaction. The result is a painful mismatch between outward success and inner life, especially when achievement is treated as the route to happiness rather than one part of a meaningful life.

Meaning comes from people, not achievements

Brooks recalls interviewing an iconic Wall Street executive in her late fifties. She had money to spare and an epic career, yet felt unhappy: her husband and she were “roommates,” she barely knew her children, believed employees feared her, and had lost close friendships. Asked why she had not addressed these losses, she replied, “I’ve always chosen to be special rather than happy.” Brooks calls this “the striver’s lament”: achievement and status can crowd out the connections that make life meaningful.

His central lesson is simple: “Meaning comes from people, not from things.” For ambitious people rewarded for mastering things, that can be easy to learn late. But happiness need not wait until after success. A widely cited 2005 meta-analysis by Sonja Lyubomirsky, Laura King, and Ed Diener found that positive emotion frequently precedes—and helps produce—success across work, relationships, and health. That evidence challenges the idea that happiness is merely a prize for doing well. Positive emotion can be part of what helps us move forward. Meaningful work can also serve as an upstream force behind desired outcomes, Brooks argues, while close relationships remind us that a life’s value cannot be measured by achievements alone.

Fame and smartphones can undermine meaning

Brooks names money, power, pleasure and fame as four idols people may chase, but he sees fame as especially corrosive. Our brains evolved for status competition in small groups, he says, and are poorly equipped for comparing ourselves with billions of people. Money, power and pleasure can coexist with happiness when they serve something larger; they become a problem when treated as ends in themselves.

He also warns that smartphones can distance us from meaning by mediating our relationships and turning life into a simulation. Brooks connects the arrival of smartphones with a rise in young people who say their lives feel meaningless, while stressing that life’s meaning cannot be simulated.

Phones may also distract from demanding work. A 2017 study found that participants did worst on cognitive tasks when a silenced phone was on the desk and best when it was in another room. Later reviews suggest the effect is smaller and narrower than early reports implied, appearing mainly in working memory tasks. Still, even the device’s proximity can be a distraction. Brooks’s prescription is simple, though not easy: love real people in real life—and put down the phone.

Build meaning into your career

Brooks advises strivers to first remove what blocks meaning, then build what supplies it. He finds meaning in four institutions: “faith, family, friendship, and work that serves other people.” For careers, that means treating service and close relationships not as rewards to pursue after success, but as part of what makes work worthwhile.

Drawing on what he has learned from studying addiction, Brooks describes change as a process: first becoming fed up enough to say, “I can’t live this way. I won’t live this way”; then understanding what has been controlling you; and finally learning to live in a whole new way. That last step is hard, he says, because “the problem is changing all your friends.” It requires more than recognizing a harmful pattern: it means changing how you live.

In practice, that may mean deciding where your phone belongs during focused work and putting it away, while protecting the relationships and service that give your career purpose. Notice, too, when you are choosing to be special rather than happy. Meaning can be built with the same discipline strivers already bring to work—and when it becomes central to a career, success is more likely to feel worth having.