When achievement stops working: rethinking happiness, purpose and the shape of a life
Many of us reach a point where achievement stops feeling like enough.
Not because we have failed, but because we have followed the script and arrived. The goals are met, yet something feels missing.
The issue is not ambition. It is an over-reliance on goal-driven success, where fulfilment is always tied to the next milestone.
What often gets neglected are the parts of life that are meaningful in themselves. Learning, connecting, reflecting, being present.
Sustainable wellbeing and effective leadership come from holding both.
Success is not only what you achieve. It is how you experience the process.
Many people today speak about the “midlife crisis.” Increasingly, we also hear about the “quarter-life crisis.” Different stages, different pressures, but often the same underlying experience. A sense that something is not quite right. A questioning of direction. A quiet unease that the path you are on may not lead where you once believed it would.
Whether it arrives at thirty-five or fifty-five, this moment is rarely about age. It is about meaning. It is about the realisation that the formula you have been following may no longer hold. What once felt motivating begins to feel repetitive. What once felt purposeful begins to feel thin.
As a coach working across leadership, personal, and professional development, I see this not as a crisis, but as a turning point. It is a shift in how we understand happiness, success, and what it means to live well.
At the centre of this shift is an idea articulated by philosopher Kieran Setiya: the distinction between telic and atelic activities.
The promise: a life built on goals
When we are younger, life is largely structured around telic activities, things done for the sake of completion.
Get the degree. Secure the job. Buy the house. Find the partner. Move up.
These goals are not trivial. They give direction, momentum, and a sense of progress. They organise our time and shape our identity. In many ways, they are necessary.
But telic activities have a built-in limitation. They erase themselves when completed.
Once you achieve the goal, it disappears. What remains is a brief sense of satisfaction, followed by the need for the next target.
This creates what positive psychology researcher Tal Ben-Shahar calls the arrival fallacy, the belief that happiness lives just beyond the next milestone.
And so we continue. Achieving, progressing, accumulating, assuming that fulfilment is always one step further ahead.
The betrayal: when arrival feels empty
At some point, many people arrive.
They reach the version of life they once imagined would make everything feel complete. And instead of fulfilment, they experience something closer to absence.
Not failure. Not regret, necessarily. But a kind of hollowness.
This is not because anything has gone wrong. It is because the underlying model was incomplete.
Psychologically, this is reinforced by hedonic adaptation, our tendency to return to a baseline level of satisfaction after positive change. What once felt significant quickly becomes normal.
Neurologically, it is tied to how the brain processes reward. Anticipation often carries more energy than attainment. Once the goal is reached, the motivational system resets.
Developmentally, it aligns with what psychologist Erik Erikson described as a shift toward generativity. A stage where meaning comes less from personal achievement and more from contribution, connection, and continuity.
What feels like disappointment is often something more constructive. The recognition that the rules have changed.
The realisation: happiness is not a destination
The turning point comes when we begin to question the assumption that happiness is something to be reached.
This is where Setiya’s second concept becomes important. Atelic activities.
Atelic activities are not aimed at completion. They are done for their own sake.
Walking, not to get somewhere, but because walking itself is worthwhile. Spending time with people, not to achieve an outcome, but to be with them. Learning, not for a credential, but for the experience of understanding.
These activities do not disappear when completed because they are never truly completed. They are ongoing, identity-shaping practices.
This idea resonates deeply with older philosophical traditions. Aristotle described eudaimonia not as a fleeting feeling, but as a way of living, a sustained practice of flourishing.
Similarly, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi showed that people experience the greatest sense of meaning not when they achieve something, but when they are fully engaged in the process itself.
Happiness, in this sense, is not something you earn. It is something you practice.
The shift: from achievement to presence
This is where many professionals and leaders face a quiet but profound choice.
Do you continue to build your life around increasingly complex goals, hoping that the next layer will finally resolve the feeling?
Or do you begin to rebalance, to create space for ways of living that are not defined by completion?
This is not about abandoning ambition. Telic activities still matter. They build capability, create structure, and enable contribution.
But without atelic grounding, they become exhausting.
Research in motivation by Edward Deci and Richard Ryan shows that sustainable wellbeing comes from intrinsic drivers. Autonomy, competence, and relatedness. These are experienced in the doing, not the finishing.
Similarly, Daniel Pink highlights that purpose, mastery, and autonomy, not external rewards, sustain engagement over time.
In practical terms, this means shifting from a life optimised purely for productivity to one that allows for presence.
The integration: designing a life that holds both
A useful way to think about this is as a life portfolio.
Telic elements Projects, goals, milestones, outcomes. These create direction and forward movement.
Atelic elements Relationships, learning, reflection, craft, care. These create meaning and continuity.
The problem is not that modern life includes too many goals. It is that it often excludes everything else.
Rebalancing does not require radical change. It requires intentional design.
Protect time for activities that have no endpoint. Engage in conversations that are not transactional. Learn without needing to apply it immediately. Create space for thinking, noticing, and being.
This aligns with approaches like slow productivity, advocated by Cal Newport, where depth and sustainability are prioritised over constant output.
It also connects strongly with leadership practice, particularly in Aotearoa New Zealand, where mana-enhancing leadership emphasises dignity, relationship, and collective wellbeing over individual achievement.
Leaders who move beyond a purely telic mindset tend to build environments with greater psychological safety, as explored by Amy Edmondson, stronger trust, and more sustainable performance.
A different kind of success
What emerges from all of this is not a rejection of success, but a redefinition of it.
Success is no longer just what you complete. It is how you live while you are completing it.
It is whether your days contain experiences that are meaningful in themselves, not just steps toward something else.
It is whether your identity is tied only to outcomes, or also to ways of being. Curious, present, connected, engaged.
The so-called midlife or quarter-life crisis is not a breakdown. It is a signal. A prompt to expand the way you define a good life.
Final reflection
If there is a quiet discomfort sitting underneath your achievements, it is worth paying attention to. Not as a problem to solve, but as information.
It may be pointing you toward something that was always available, but never prioritised.
Not another goal. Not another milestone.
But a different way of inhabiting your life.
One where the value is not at the finish line, but in the experience of moving, learning, connecting, and being, right now.