The Tension Between Success And Happiness - Paul Millerd

I think what we really want is to be useful. We want to do work that matters. We don't want to do meaningless work. It drives humans crazy to do stuff we don't care about. But we all have this desire to do stuff. We want to contribute, we want to help people, we want to do things that we feel like are important.

(wind blowing) Paul Milled, welcome to the show.

Excited to be here, Chris.

I have been fully adopted by Texas now, so I went to a-

(laughs)

... Co Wetzel country music f- rock concert in a stadium last night. People unironically wearing cowboy hats, people unironically saying, like, "Dang," and "Yee-haw," and, dude, I'm, f- I'm one of the locals now.

I think I'm the same. Me and my wife, uh, were saying, "We still have to go to a rodeo, and then we can probably say that." (laughs)

There's, like, a sequence of, uh-

(laughs)

... qualifications or trials-

Onboarding.

... that you need to go through. Yeah, yeah, precisely. How many cans of Lone Star have you drank? How many times have you said the word dang?

Exactly. Yeah, we, we love it here. It seems like there's a convergence of internet weirdos and hyper-curious-

(laughs)

... kind of creators, uh, (laughs) that I've just really enjoyed.

Well, the first time that we met was at the, uh, LessWrong-

(laughs)

... meetup, which is, that's the-

About the nerdiest place you can be.

Oh, that's the synthesis. Yeah, that's-

(laughs)

... the fucking epicenter. That's patient zero for the nerdiest people (laughs) in, in Austin. And they'd even imported people from outside of Austin to make it significantly more nerdy.

Exactly. Yeah, it, it's been great. I love it here.

One of the things that we've both been converging on was something that I put into my newsletter this week, and I want to talk about that. So, I'm going to read the newsletter out for people that didn't read it. If you haven't read it, go to chriswillex.com/books, and you can sign up for free. Uh, so one of the most common tensions I talk about at the moment is between the desire for success and a desire to feel like we're enough. Success is a strange thing. Presumably, we want success because we think a more successful life will bring us more happiness, meaning, and fulfillment. Here's the problem: we sacrifice the thing we want, happiness, for the thing which is supposed to get it, success. Failure can make you miserable, but I'm not sure success will make you happy. One of the most common dynamics I see amongst high performers is this: parents want their child to do well. Parents encourage their child to do well by praising them when they succeed and criticizing when they fail. The child learns that praise and admiration is contingent on succeeding. That lesson metastasizes through early adulthood into, "I am only worthy of love and acceptance and belonging if I succeed." Now, powered by an internal feeling of insufficiency, this person is driven to achieve many things. They're prepared to outwork, outhustle, and outsuffer everyone else because they're not just running toward a life they want, they're running away from a life that they fear. Success and progress ameliorates the feelings of insufficiency. Therefore, success and progress become prioritized above everything else. Now, don't get me wrong, many high achievers genuinely love the work that they do, and many are driven by a well-balanced simple desire to maximize their time on this planet rather than trying to fill a void inside of themselves. But if I was to place a bet, I'd guess that the majority of high performers are driven by fears of insufficiency rather than a holistic desire to be better. I think people who are high achievers, on average, are more miserable than the average person. So what does it mean that the people we most admire are the ones with the least admirable internal states? If the pursuit of success is in an effort to make us happy, and in the pursuit of success we make ourselves miserable, why not shortcut the entire process and just be happy? Is that even possible? Now, external accolades do count for a lot. I don't think that recanting all worldly possessions and retreating to a cave in the woods is an optimal strategy. Some degree of external material success is important to make us feel validated and satiate our desire for status and respect. But external success won't fill an internal void. Insufficien- insufficiency adaptation is this: if your drive to succeed comes from a fear of insufficiency, and you continue to disprove those fears with success in the real world, and yet the feelings of insufficiency persists, what makes you think that the answer to this problem is more success? There's no clean answer here. The world is messy, and we're hopelessly irrational. You don't need to let go of all success goals, but spend some time working out whether there's a shorter route to the life you want by removing obstacles rather than just pressing harder on the accelerator.