Success and Happiness - V

The one thing that gets everyone interested is this word 'Love'. I should have titled this post the 'Love Chemical', perhaps, because that is what Oxytocin is - the chemical that causes the happiness related to love.

It is not just romantic love which sets off the Oxytocin. All human relations - parental, sibling, friendships, camaraderie - and even your relationship with your pets gives you a Oxytocin rush. That 'Jaadu ki jappi' - the high of hugging - is a Oxytocin high.

Forming lasting relationships, relationships which you can lean back on IS the one source of happiness which can be said to raise your mean level of happiness. All the others are happiness of the moment - there for that time and then gone unless you repeat the experience.

Relationships though come with attendant risk. GOOD relationships give you joy but purely good relationships exist only in your fantasies. All relationships also carry an element of stress - where the mutual expectations mismatch and, thus, come with a proportion of unhappiness. To nurture the happiness and to, over a period of time, reduce the friction is the hallmark of good relations. Toxic relationships tend to end up maximizing anxiety and stress for at least one of the parties to the relationship.

Success - the achievement of goals in the broadest sense and commonly understood to be the achievement of career goals - can and does, as it seems to more often than not, get in the way of Oxytocin. 

You can neither develop or sustain a healthy relationship without spending time continuously on it. AND people tend to take away time from relationships to give to the pursuit of success. After all, the time needed by relationships is seldom 'URGENT' - as in needed at exactly THAT moment - whereas urgency is the middle name of a career pursuit.

And, so, while piously intoning 'Never let the urgent overwhelm the important', you miss your kid's birthday for that urgent presentation; send your family on a vacation while you attend the eighteenth important meeting on cost control in the last 2 months; religiously 'like' your boss' post on balancing work and life from his golfing holiday while he has ensured you slave in your office on your wedding anniversary on the urgent report he requires the moment he comes back to office...and, at the end of it all, scream about how ungrateful your children are for all the sacrifices you made for their well-being.

Your nature can make things even worse. If you start seeing people around you as rivals who are to be overcome; casual acquaintances and friends in terms of whether they are less or more 'successful' than you; every setback as the Universe's conspiracy to ensure that you do not succeed...in short, if you make 'success' an obsession, rest assured that happiness of any sort can never stay with you for any length of time.

Happiness CAN coexist with a pursuit of success. If you pick the right way, happiness can be a result of the pursuit of success.

What Happiness cannot exist with IS an obsession for success.