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Comment by crazydiamond | Hacker News Reader

#2 – Happiness and success are two different things.

Could not agree more. Our definition of happiness often includes "Success". And people's definition of success is quite relative, depending on other people's current perceptions and ideas of how we should be or what people envy, or image.

I retired 6 years back, spend more time sitting and walking in parks, feeding and playing with stray dogs, and remaining in the present moment. I've never been happier. Others see mine as a life wasted - dropping a high paying job, loads of money to spend, and becoming a miserly bum !

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I strongly disagree - Success is "The accomplishment of an aim or purpose" (OED), not "becoming a high-powered executive with a tastefully thick, subtly off-white, watermarked business card" or whatever mystery definition of success this article seems to be using. It has absolutely nothing to do with other people.

Anyone who claims to be successful but not happy, has failed in setting the right goals, and is therefore not truly successful.

You are evidently successful, because you are happy. Your goal seems to be to retire from work and chill out in the park. A goal which you have achieved. The surfer in the article appears to have the succeeded in being able to surf all the time.

I was not going by dictionary definitions, but by what people around me seem to think. In my country, success has very much to do with whether you are in a coveted job (usually meaning an MBA or engineer/doctor/civil services). This changes over the years, e.g. software engineer came and went. MBA is now going out.

People feel they are happy if they are conforming to the societal definition of success. Your society may be quite different.

Dictionary definitions only reflect the actual meaning of words in conventional use by the speakers of the language. If the OED were prescriptive, then the definition of success would simply be "outcome", whether positive or not, as that is the original meaning of the word.

Perhaps your language has a different word which is conventionally translated into English as "success", but would better be translated as "prestige". In that case, you are right - happiness and prestige are two very different things. History is littered with notoriously unhappy, yet highly prestigious individuals.

I do concede that achieving a degree of prestige is a popular goal, and it is an obvious way of demonstrating success; but prestige is not synonymous with success.

people's definition of success is quite relative, depending on other people's current perceptions and ideas of how we should be or what people envy, or image.

You can easily replace success with happiness in that sentence.

For example, spending more time sitting and walking in parks, feeding and playing with stray dogs, and remaining in the present moment (whatever that means) sounds extremely boring to me. It would make me miserable rather than happy.

It's more complicated than it looks.

> You can easily replace success with happiness in that sentence. Yes, but my point was that often people's definition of happiness contains other concepts, which are not investigated by ourselves. Or, we accept moving/relative definitions for these that are not our own. One concept depending on other concepts etc.

>It's more complicated than it looks. I think when we investigate the meaning of happiness (for ourselves) then its actually simpler.

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