Genuine joy is forged in the crucible of challenge, not in the shallow waters of easy satisfaction
If I were to give you an offer — you will start a company with 2 friends on a new product specialising in making games realistic. Your company will be successful, going for public listing and eventually grow 591,078% from the IPO — would you take it?
The catch is, of course, there will be 2 decades of nonstop setbacks and lowlights with only rare highs. It will be filled with stress, uncertainty, loneliness, and “ample doses of pain and suffering”. A bit like “staring into the abyss and eating glass”. There will be adoration and invitations to every conference in the world, but it will only come 20 years later. Would you still take it? How much joy are you willing to forgo to do something worthwhile?
The secret to happiness
Society and academics have poured time and money to explore the happiness question. The world’s oldest longitudinal study is singularly dedicated to this. Happiness labs are created in companies to make joy a consideration. Countless bestsellers on the topic have filled the bookstores.
We know that the correlation between money and happiness stops at a threshold, where even doubling or tripling doesn’t make a difference. We know that the joy we feel with badges of achievements is, at best, fleeting before we revert back to baseline and chase another in a hedonic treadmill. We know that fame is prison.
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Despite these insights, the secret to happiness remains surprisingly straightforward: relationships. It’s the time you spend with the people you love, the friendships you forge, and the memories you make.
Yet, we don’t spend time on it — not for a lack of knowledge but a lack of intention. It is true that if you were to travel with your family for a few months in a year, it would make you happier, but you probably still wouldn’t halt your new biotech startup to do it.
Read the rest of this story here: https://www.thepeakmagazine.com.sg/?p=178517
Author of Sang Kancil (Penguin) | Tech | Public Policy
7 个月Goosebumps reading this. Thanks so much for giving me the opportunity to finally work with you. This is my first time writing a broad philosophical piece like this — it reminded me how much I love guardrails. But only through works like this do I also learn more about myself. That joy comes from hardship and coexists with pain.