14 ms·

Happy and successful people want to keep being happy and successful for longer. How evil of them!

• karamanolev 4y ago
  Some of them are surely happy and successful. I'd like to think (no citation whatsoever), that a nontrivial portion of them have the mindset of "I'm currently building this empire and then I will reap the benefits of this vast wealth". They are not happy per se in the moment, but have some future vision of happiness away from the grind of being "successful". At some point, they realize that they don't have that much time left to actually enjoy life outside of amassing money/possessions, so they get obsessed with extending their life.
• agent008t 4y ago
  Ironically, happiness and success often don't go together. Someone who is happy has no need of working towards success (defined conventionally, as getting close to the top of the wealth/career/peer ranking). It is often unhappiness that drives people towards success. And then, due to hedonic adaptation, they find they are not necessarily much happier, there is always someone ahead of them on some metric so there is always more success to strive for to alleviate unhappiness. It only really works when what you call success comes as a byproduct of something else, not as a goal, of an activity that makes one happy regardless of peer ranking or any other such 'success' metric. Feynman comes to mind, who seemed to be mostly driven by curiosity and the joy of finding out how things work. In fact, according to his own writings (or my interpretation of them), he was most unproductive and miserable when he was trying to be 'successful'.