Happiness, No Strings Attached

A birthday reflection on joy, ambition, and letting go of outcome addiction.

It is my birthday today! And for once, I’m not thinking about what’s next.
I’m thinking about how long I’ve spent chasing it.

I’ve lived much of my life in pursuit mode. The next grade. The next job. The next title. The next version of myself. Next “next.” And for a long time, I mistook that for ambition. It looked like drive. It felt like progress.

But lately, I’ve been wondering if some of it was just fear - fear of stillness, of what might surface if I stopped striving. A quiet belief that if I ever let myself pause, everything might fall apart. Or worse, I might discover that I didn’t know who I was without something to chase.

One memory stays with me. I was 18, walking down 5th Avenue on my first visit to New York. We stopped in front of the towering glass building of one of the world’s most prestigious banks. I remember saying - out loud - “If I ever get a job here, everything will work out. Life will be perfect.”

Years later, I did get the offer. And I turned it down - without fanfare, without reflection - for something “better.” I barely remembered that younger version of me until someone brought her up. That’s the trap with achievement: The second you arrive, you’re already moving on. The horizon moves with you.

In Silicon Valley, this treadmill is supercharged. Here, success is both mundane and mythic - someone you know just raised $50M, someone else got acquired, someone else passed on that opportunity and regrets it every day. It’s a place where “what ifs” echo loudly: What if I had joined that startup? What if I had said yes to that offer?

Comparison becomes a lifestyle. Regret becomes a currency. But here’s a truth that’s brought me peace: Even if your “what if” had worked out, you’d still be chasing something else. You’d still be waiting for the next thing to feel like “enough.” If happiness is contingent on an outcome, it keeps getting deferred. It lives just on the other side of someday.

Psychologists call it hedonic adaptation - the idea that no matter what life hands you, within a year, your happiness resets. Win the lottery, lose a limb, get the job, miss the job… within a year, most people end up back where they started emotionally. The dial resets. The chase resumes.

That sounds bleak, but to me, it’s freeing. It means:

• Your joy isn’t behind some locked door labeled "achievement.”

• You don’t need to wait to celebrate.

• You don’t need a reason to be at peace.

I’m not saying let go of goals. I still care deeply. I still strive. But I’m learning not to make my peace conditional on a future version of my life.

Ironically, this shift - from gripping outcomes tightly to holding them lightly - has made me better. Better at work. Better with people. Better with myself.

The great paradox is that letting go of results often produces the best ones.

When you stop working out of fear - of being behind, of being forgotten - you start working from a deeper place. A place that’s rooted in joy, curiosity, play.

The people I most admire aren’t obsessed with winning. They’re obsessed with doing the work well. They’re in it for the craft. The game. The feeling of flow. They’re not chasing a reward. The work is the reward.

You can outwork someone for a while.You can even outrun them for a stretch.
But you can never outlast someone who finds joy in the work.

The Bhagavad Gita says: “कर्म करो, फल की चिंता मत करो”. Do the work. Let go of the outcome. It’s not detachment - it’s discipline. A kind of quiet clarity about where to place your energy, and where not to. If the journey isn’t worth it without a guaranteed reward, it may not be your journey.

So today, I’m not raising a glass to accomplishments. I’m raising it to the process.
To the slow burn. To the messy middle. To joy that doesn’t need a reason.

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