(Why chasing success never feels enough—and how to step off the treadmill without quitting life)

• Success is shaped by forces beyond our control—so it can never fully satisfy
• The trap is simple:  we chase salary, titles, and status…while the goalpost keeps moving.
• Most of what we desire isn’t even ours—it’s borrowed
• The exit ramp? Define “enough” and optimize for balance, not comparison

This series documents the ideas, mental models, and practical lessons that helped me learn skills and build habits over the years. These insights come from people and ideas I’ve encountered over the years. The path was anything but linear. It involved trial and error, false starts, and long stretches of inconsistency. I don’t aim for perfection. I drift off track at times—but once something becomes a habit, returning to it is easier.

Before we begin, a brief disclaimer: This essay is not prescriptive. The goal is not imitation, but reflection—the truth must be discovered personally. As J. Krishnamurti warned, the danger of following any framework blindly is mistaking it for truth itself.

If you’d like a deeper context, I’ve explored these ideas earlier.

1. Self-improvement:Goals, Mindset, Habits, Focus, Practice, and Self-help books
2. Habits: Discipline and Habits – How to Build Habits
3. Practice: Practice Vs Deliberate Practice
4. Passion:Passion and Skill Set
5. Hard Work: Hard Work–Privilege–Luck–Myth of Merit

As we have seen in the Hard Work–Privilege–Luck–Myth of Merit blog discussion, success is an outcome—but outcomes rarely come from a single cause. Talent, skill, hard work, privilege and luck all matter. This post holds these truths together and asks a harder question: if success is partly outside our control, how should we relate to it without getting trapped?

Five ingredients of Success

• Talent: Often invisible but the right environment pulls it out.
• Skillset: What we can rely on and is under our control—built through deliberate practice.
• Hard work: Under our control—time, focus, and persistence—especially during long, boring stretches where nothing seems to move.
• Privilege: the starting position—family stability, education, networks, safety nets, health, and social capital.
• Luck: timing and randomness—being at the right intersection of opportunity and readiness.

These ingredients combine differently for different people—making outcome comparisons psychologically dangerous. The same effort can yield wildly different results—depending on starting conditions, timing, and the arena we chose to play in. If luck is the roll of the dice, Privilege is how much the dice is “loaded” in our favour before we even throw them. While luck is usually seen as random, Privilege is “luck that persists”. It is a constant, favourable tailwind. Privilege increases the surface area for luck to hit.

Scenario 1: The Classic Success Path

Tom finishes college and is lucky enough to get a high-paying job in a multinational corporation. Tom rises quickly through the career and becomes a Director by the age of thirty-five. He ventures into a startup, and in five years makes it big with the acquisition. Tom owns villas, cars, takes luxury vacations, and makes golf trips around the world. He continues to pursue fiscal growth, title, and power. Tom believes fiscal and professional growth are the only valid metrics of success.

Scenario 2: Redefining Success

Scenario 2 is similar to Scenario 1, except that Jerry, once he achieves financial stability, starts thinking about how to take control of his time to do things that are on his want list—focus on picking up new skills like learning the piano and writing, allocate time for social service, coach and mentor the next generation of students, and spend more time with family and friends. Jerry continues to work but has taken a different role that pays him less while giving him the time to pursue personal goals that give him satisfaction and meaning—goals aligned with his internal compass.

Scenario 3: Parallel Path Strategy

Tom, from his teenage years, is clear in his mind that his calling is in wildlife and nature photography and related research. After talking to experts, he realizes two things. The career has a slow ramp. It also requires another job in the early years before it stabilizes. Tom finishes his engineering course and picks up an individual contributor role that pays his bills and addresses other financial challenges in life. He doesn’t put in more than the required 40 hours of hard work every week and spends the rest of the time pursuing his hobby. He is not after promotion, but he is clear on the fact that he has to keep his skills up to date to retain his value in the job market, which he manages. Once he builds a financial cushion, he switches to a three-day workweek and spends more time on wildlife photography and research as a freelancer.

In the above scenario, Tom could be an artist—writer, singer, dancer, painter—and the description fits. This doesn’t mean all artists have to go through the same outline. If they are privileged or willing to limit their lifestyle expenses and expectations within their earnings, they can jump into their artist career from day one.

Scenario 4: Purpose Driven Careers

A variation of Scenario 3: Tom and Jerry are clear that they want to get into the teaching profession. They know it doesn’t pay like the technology industry, but their metric of success is bringing change to students’ lives as teachers. Both choose a lifestyle within their means. They don’t compare themselves against curated leaderboards or social media benchmarks. For them, the internal compass is more important than insatiable desires.

These scenarios show how differently success can be defined. I don’t want to get into right-or-wrong judgments. My aim is to unpack different vectors of success. It is up to each individual to think, internalize, and apply these ideas in their lives as they see fit. I lean more toward a balance of success vectors than toward pursuing only the fiscal and professional dimensions. If that is not agreeable to the reader, feel free to stop here.

How Society Defines Success

Society still largely defines success through visibility. The “six-figure income by 25” (100000 to 999999 annual income in the US, ₹100000 per month in Bengaluru, India) or “Founder at 30” are primary valued metrics. This creates a visible “arrived” lifestyle—posh home, car, domestic help, luxury vacations. Corporate roles are often valued more highly than teaching roles.

The Promotion Paradox

We finish college and join a corporation at an entry level. We put in 50–60 hours every week and keep getting promoted every two years. We are moving fast up the career ladder. Our salaries go higher. By the twelfth year, we reach senior manager level. We want to hit the Director role and work toward it. We put in 60–70-hour weeks for two years to land the Director title. The day we get it, we celebrate. But the expected relaxation never comes. Instead, stress increases. Expectations rise. Stakes get larger. We are already looking at the “Senior Director” title to find the peace we thought we would have now. We expect happiness from promotions—but it fades quickly. The run continues with no end in sight.

The Illusion of “Making It”

How many of us have told ourselves, “Once I get …………, I will finally be able to relax and slow down”? Except that we don’t stop once we hit the milestone. We see a new peak—and the goalpost shifts again. We spend our lives building a ladder—only to find the wall it’s leaning against is moving. Why do we behave like this? We behave like this because of our biology. We are wired for anticipation, not attainment. Anticipation gives us the high. Preparing for a marathon, an exam, or a climb gives us the high. Once we finish the run, write the exam, or complete the climb, the high vanishes. Once we “arrive,” our baseline resets. We need a bigger hit to feel the same high. We are stuck in a systemic loop where achievement doesn’t lead to rest, but to a requirement for more achievement.

Mimetic Desire: Borrowed Wants

We are never short of goals because our wants keep growing. We think we will save more money with the hike that comes with the new promotion. But the reality looks different. Spending rises. We upgrade everything—homes, cars, clothes, travel. We aren’t chasing what we want; we are chasing what we see others wanting.

We might be perfectly happy with our three-year-old phone until we see a colleague with the latest model or read a review by a YouTube influencer. Suddenly, our phone feels “slow” even though its utility hasn’t changed. Here, the desire is born from comparison, not need. We don’t know what to want on our own. Instead, we look at others and imitate their desires. We are not competing with our neighbours—we are competing against a global scoreboard.

The Treadmill That Never Stops

As income, power, and possessions grow, the run still doesn’t stop. After every achievement we feel happy, but it is short-lived. What we often miss: the brain quickly turns luxuries into necessities. We possess an incredible ability to adapt to new circumstances. Adaptability helped our ancestors survive. In modern life, it means that the “dream villa” becomes “just where I live” within a few months. Our brain resets luxury to normal. The baseline changes. This reset ensures that external achievements can never provide permanent internal satisfaction.

Let’s do a thought experiment: When we got our first “pay check”, it felt like a fortune. Today, that same amount might not even cover our rent or car EMI. As incomes rises, lifestyle expands to match it, leaving us feeling just as financially squeezed as we were when we earned less.

The Success Trap

So far we have looked at success through the professional axis. This is what the “Achievement Society” optimizes for. In this axis, success is measured by externally visible factors—salary, title, power, and mimetic status. A purely financial or professional lens turns life into a one-dimensional race. This axis is infinite—higher salary, next title, more power, millions turning into billions, bigger houses and cars—we can run all our lives.

These metrics fall under four fundamental insatiable desires: acquisitiveness, rivalry, vanity, and the love of power. Bertrand Russell argued that these infinite impulses are what prevent human beings from resting even in paradise. We reach a state where our self-worth is tied to a moving finish line, fuelled by the illusion that the next achievement will finally bring permanent peace. The trap isn’t failure—it’s succeeding at a life we don’t even like.

Bertrand Russell emphasized that these impulses are generally detrimental, but that they can be managed through education and a social system that promotes intelligence over destructive ambition. 

We can infer from the above scenarios that success can’t be viewed only on one axis—the fiscal and professional vector. We need to unpack the other ways of looking at success.

Success Has Multiple Vectors

Defining success through only financial or professional lens turns life into a one-dimensional race. A teacher who changes lives, a parent who creates stability, a Gandhian who dedicates her life to social change, a doctor who spends her life providing free medical service—each of these is a form of success, even if it doesn’t meet the default financial or professional success template. Some successes are even posthumous: writers, composers, and artists who struggled in their lifetime but became widely valued later. That’s a reminder that success is not only about personal ability—it is also about context, and timing.

We need to look at success as a vector—a quantity that has both magnitude (how far we have gone) and direction (where we are actually headed). We could be running on a treadmill without going anywhere—active but not making any progress. Or we could be running fast in the wrong direction. Success is not a single line—it’s a point on a multi-axis graph.

Vector	What it means
Skill / Craft	Mastery, learning velocity, the ability to produce quality outcomes repeatedly.
Fiscal	Financial security, savings runway, freedom of choice, low dependence on a single paycheck, ability to say “no”.
Physical	Health, fitness, energy, physical mobility, sleep quality.
Mental / Emotional	Clarity, resilience, emotional regulation, capacity for deep contemplation, freedom from compulsive comparison, ability to resist “sameness”, ability to say “no” to stimuli.
Relational	Depth of friendships and family life, quality of our connection to things outside self, quality of our engagement with the “other”—people or ideas that challenge our ego rather than just affirming it.
Excellence	Living up to our potential in a specific craft or role regardless of whether it makes money or not.
Meaning / Legacy	Whether our work and choices feel aligned with values bigger than short-term validation.

External Noise vs. Internal Compass

The goal isn’t to reject career and fiscal growth or to escape the world or quit our jobs. It is to stop treating career and fiscal growth as the only vector and the only acceptable state. It is about internalizing the trap so it no longer has power over us. It is the realization that the “more” we are chasing is a ghost. It is about designing our lives so progress doesn’t destroy balance—especially across fiscal, physical, and mental health.

To find balance, we must first separate two lenses we often mix up: external expectations and internal compass. External expectations are loud and repetitive. The internal voice is quieter and often delayed. To know which one is which, we need filters that separate signal from noise. The internal compass says we should compare our present self with our past self to measure our rate of growth, while external noise compares our growth to social media benchmarks and curated leaderboards that make our normal life feel insufficient. Living someone else’s definition of the “good life” is not autonomy. Real autonomy is how much of our time we truly own and our ability to say “no.” We have to discount myths like progress being linear and life always going “up.” Real paths include pauses, retreats, and pivots.

Why Career and Money Still Matter

So far we have figured out different dimensions of success and how to filter signal from noise. We are part of this society—we have to operate within it. To live, we need money. Money is needed to solve money problems—there is no way around it. Only money can pay the bills, get our children through school and college, support our aged parents, keep our skills up to date with current trends, and cover medical requirements. Fiscal security is one of the key ingredients for leading a happy life.

We need a career to support our lives and build a safety net for the future. Not everyone will get a job they “want.” Most of us land somewhere between “want” and “reality.” As we go through the career ladder, we have to make moves toward a career that is closer to our “want.” It may or may not happen, but that should not stop us from looking for it. My view is to continue with the current job as long as it is good enough, gives a good income, and offers above-average growth, even if it doesn’t match our “want.” For example, one may want to be an artist—a writer, painter, or singer. But these professions may not match the income of an engineering graduate in a corporate role. One option is to view the corporate career as a way to achieve fiscal stability and security and find alignment outside work that gives psychological balance and balance key life vectors. The other option is to pursue the artist’s path if one can accept and work through the slow progress curve and make adjustments to lifestyle—they may or may not become world-famous artists, but they gain balance and internal alignment.

Stepping off the Treadmill Without Quitting life

We discussed the career and fiscal requirement. The real question: how do we avoid the trap without drastic moves like quitting or withdrawing from life? We need an “exit” plan for whatever we start. “No Plan B” sounds appealing—but works only in movies. In real life, we need to plan guard rails and exit ramps. Expert investors are clear about when to exit. They keep greed under their control, not the other way around. Let’s discuss a few exit ramps and guard rails we need to build into our lives so progress doesn’t destroy the balance.

• Fiscal: define “enough” early—a stopping point for lifestyle inflation. Money is for safety and freedom—not identity. If the money we save doesn’t give us control over our time, what and whose purpose does it serve?
• Physical: Protect the body—treat sleep, fitness, movement, and food as non-negotiable infrastructure—not “nice-to-haves” after we succeed. A healthy body supports a healthy mind. Our body is the only account that can’t be refinanced. The bank balance is the egg, but our body is the goose—if the goose dies, the eggs stop.
• Mental—Comparison: Reduce compulsive comparison with peers and social media benchmarks. Learn to say “no” to external stimuli that turn life into a scoreboard. Let’s get into our heads the fact that our race is only with our former selves and not with others—am I a better person today than I was yesterday?
• Mental—Learning: What we do in our jobs can become repetitive over time. We will get complacent and learning will stop. Pick a new skill to learn that will stretch and challenge our brain—music, painting, carpentry, or any other craft. Choose something creative that we do with our hands. Move on to another skill once the current one is mastered to a meaningful level. Check my earlier blog Practice Vs Deliberate Practice on how to master a new skill.
• Identity Decoupling: Keep at least one activity with zero market value—something we do because it is intrinsically good and not for money.
• The Suitcase Test: If we lose title, money, and possessions tomorrow—what would still remain valuable about us?

Practical Techniques to Stay on Track

I have made it a practice to revisit the above checklist periodically over the last few years and correct course when I drift. We often measure our self-worth by utility value. One way out is an “identity decoupling” exercise. Write down three or four things you did that had “zero market value”—walked in the sun, read a book for pleasure unrelated to your career, chatted with a friend or family member after a long gap, prepared a meal for the family, did freehand drawing, or went birdwatching.

Another interesting technique I use is “intentional deprivation,” which helps us reset to simple experiences and eliminate high-stimulation triggers.

• Ignore email, browsing, and news for 12-24 hours
• Walk or drive without listening to music or podcast—in silence
• Sit in the garden or park bench doing absolutely nothing—no thinking and observe the environment
• While waiting in line, don’t take out the phone—observe the people around or contemplate

The practical tools help us pause. Philosophy helps us see the race itself is a hallucination.

Philosophical Deconstruction – The Roots of the Trap

To truly escape, we have to understand and internalize the invisible forces that keep the gears turning.

The Achievement Subject

• As a society we have moved from a collective society to an individualistic one. In a collective society, the guiding force is “prohibition”—what we can’t do. In current individualistic society, the force has changed to “achievement”—what we can do.
• Now, we are achievement subjects—we exploit ourselves voluntarily under the guise of self-fulfilment.
• We don’t see rest as a right, but as a recovery-period.
• Ask the question, “when was the last time I did something solely because I enjoyed it, with no intention of improving myself or monetizing the hobby or external validation”?

The Craving to “Be”

• This is the belief that a future version of us will be more “complete” than the current one.
• As long as we are focused on who we will be after the next success—more famous, more power, more money—we are effectively treating our current life as a waiting room.
• This creates a cycle where we are always living in the future version of ourselves, rendering our present self “insufficient”.

Stoic Insight: Preferred Indifferents

• Preferred Indifferents are things that are aligned with human nature to prefer, provided they do not compromise our virtue—wealth, a successful career, power—it is perfectly fine to want, enjoy, and pursue them.
• Dispreferred Indifferents are things we usually avoid, but which ultimately cannot destroy our character—poverty, illness, career stagnation, cancelled flight.
• The trap occurs when we mistake a Preferred Indifferent for an Absolute Good. If our happiness depends on a promotion—an external event we don’t fully control—we have handed our peace of mind to a stranger.
• Reframe success as a Preferred Indifferent—”I would prefer to have a high-paying job and a successful blog. It makes life smoother. But my worth as a human being, my internal peace, and my capacity for wisdom do not depend on it. If I lose it tomorrow, I am still intact.”

Reflexive Impotence

• Mark Fisher, the author of Capitalist Realism, argued that we suffer from “reflexive impotence”—we know the loop is harmful but struggle to imagine another way of living.
• We have “commodified” our very identities. The systemic pressure that suggests if you aren’t optimizing our time for market value, we are wasting it

The most successful person in the room is rarely the one with the highest title; it is the one who is the least dependent on the next “hit” of validation.

Operational Principle: Small Rules That keep Us Out

• Write the definition of “enough”—revisit it periodically.
• Pick 2-3 simple metrics per vector to track—fiscal, physical, mental, relational, skill, meaning.
• Keep at least one sacred hobby—no optimization, no monetization, no external validation.
• Learn to say “no”—and protect time blocks that keep you healthy and human.
• Block time for weekly or monthly deep contemplation

A Calmer Definition of Success

• We cannot win a race with a moving finish line—The only way out is to step off.
• Real success is not the trophy—it is the ability to feel complete without needing it.
• The race doesn’t end when we win—It ends when we no longer need to win to feel whole. 

Some conceptual foundations are influenced by Angela Duckworth’s Grit, Nassim Taleb’s Fooled by Randomness, and Michael Sandel’s The Tyranny of Merit. Some of the books and ideas that influenced my thinking:

1. The Burnout Society by Byung-Chul Han
2. Capitalist Realism by Mark Fisher
3. Peak by Anders Ericsson
4. Mindset by Carol Dweck
5. Grit by Angela Duckworth
6. Deep Work by Cal Newport
7. Tyranny of Merit by Michael J Sandel
8. Atomic Habits by James Clear
9. Hyper Focus by Chris Bailey
10. How Minds Change by David McRaney
11. Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell
12. Fooled by Randomness by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
13. The Second Mountain by David Brooks