Why Success Feels Empty at 42

You got the thing. It might have been the promotion. The house. The salary that, at 28, you wrote on a piece of paper as the number that would mean you'd made it. The business that worked. The car that you promised yourself when the time was right, and the time finally was. Whatever that thing was, it was the thing you were working toward — the destination that justified the journey, the reward for the sustained application of effort and ambition and the periodic sacrifice of things that were probably fine to sacrifice at the time.

And now you have it. And it feels — not bad, exactly. Not nothing. But not what you expected. Not quite the arrival you promised yourself. There is, of course, a brief period of genuine satisfaction, followed by a settling, followed by the quiet but persistent realisation that the horizon has simply moved. The coordinates of the destination you reached are already being replaced by the coordinates of the next one. That the feeling you were expecting — the completeness, the settled sense of having arrived — has not materialised and is showing no signs of doing so.

This, it turns out, is not your fault. It is not your ingratitude, nor is it a character deficiency; it is, more specifically, the entirely predictable consequence of how the human brain processes achievement — and understanding the mechanism is both more useful and considerably less miserable than continuing to assume that the next thing will finally do the trick.

The hedonic treadmill

In 1971, the psychologists Philip Brickman and Donald Campbell introduced the concept of hedonic adaptation, which refers to the tendency of human beings to return to a relatively stable level of happiness or satisfaction regardless of what happens to them, positive or negative.

The more popular name for this is the hedonic treadmill. You walk fast, you get somewhere, and then the treadmill adjusts, and you're back in the same place you started, walking fast again toward the next somewhere. Yes, it's all a bit of a hamster wheel.

The evidence for it is both extensive and, frankly, somewhat depressing. Studies of lottery winners found that their reported happiness levels were elevated immediately following the win, then returned to approximately their baseline within a year. Studies of people who had acquired significant material wealth found the same pattern. Studies of professional achievement — the promotion, the recognition, the award, the milestone — found the same pattern again.

The baseline reasserts itself. The treadmill adjusts. And the thing you worked toward becomes, with remarkable efficiency, the new floor rather than the ceiling you anticipated.

But why?

Put simply, it's the brain's adaptation to any sustained stimulus, positive or negative. We can't remain excited forever, and so we default to a more familiar state. Your logic may tell you that you're infinitely better off in your lovely new home, where cash is no problem, but the thrill exhausts itself. Think about it. The brain that remains permanently excited about last year's promotion is the brain that has stopped scanning for new information.

Which brings us to . . .

The arrival fallacy

The philosopher Tal Ben-Shahar coined the term arrival fallacy to describe the belief that reaching a goal will produce sustained happiness — the assumption that the destination contains what the journey promised.

I guess most men operate under this fallacy for the majority of their working lives. Not consciously — nobody explicitly believes that the next achievement will finally and permanently resolve their vague sense of dissatisfaction — but operationally, in the way that behaviour is structured around the pursuit of successive external goals as though each one might be the one that finally delivers.

The fallacy is maintained by a cognitive error: the anticipation of the goal feels good, and the feeling is attributed to the goal rather than to the anticipation. The man who is working toward something meaningful has a sense of direction, purpose and forward momentum that produces genuine psychological wellbeing. When we achieve that thing, the anticipation ends.

The 42-year-old male

The empty success feeling is not exclusive to the 42-year-old male - but it does make for a catchy sub-heading. In reality, it arrives at various points in adult life. But it tends to achieve critical mass somewhere in the early to mid-40s for reasons that are both developmental and situational. At 42, the career trajectory is sufficiently established to be legible. The direction is set. The approximate destination is visible. And the assessment of that trajectory against the aspirations of the 25-year-old who set off toward it is, at this point, unavoidable.

This is the midlife reappraisal described in my article on the midlife reappraisal — the developmental process by which the accumulated experience of adult life is examined against the expectations with which it began. In the context of success, this examination produces a question: Is this what I meant?

For many men, the honest answer is complicated. Their career may be objectively successful by the measures applied at 25. Life contains the things identified as destinations. And the feeling — or rather, the absence of the feeling that was expected to accompany the arrival — is producing a form of confusion that the success narrative provides no framework for.

You were supposed to feel successful. You have the things that mean you are successful. Why don't you feel it?

The problem with extrinsic goals — the salary, the title, the status, the things that can be displayed or measured — is that they are evaluated by comparison. There is always a larger salary. There is always a more impressive title. The extrinsic goal that satisfied you last year is this year's baseline, against which next year's aspiration is measured. The treadmill adjusts. The feeling recedes. The horizon moves.

The goals issue

The psychological research on goal types and wellbeing is one of the more consistent bodies of evidence in the field, and it has direct bearing on why success feels empty at 42.

Edward Deci and Richard Ryan's Self-Determination Theory — the framework described in the article on in defence of the shed — distinguishes between extrinsic goals, which are pursued for external validation and reward, and intrinsic goals, which are pursued because the activity itself is meaningful, engaging or connected to personal values. The research on these two goal types and their relationship with wellbeing is unambiguous: intrinsic goal pursuit is reliably associated with sustained psychological wellbeing, while extrinsic goal pursuit produces the hedonic treadmill pattern — temporary satisfaction followed by rapid adaptation and the reassertion of baseline.

The man at 42 who has been primarily pursuing extrinsic goals — the salary, the title, the external markers of achievement — and who now has them, is experiencing the well-documented consequence of this pursuit. He has the things. The things are not producing the feeling. The feeling was, it turns out, attached to something that the things were not actually delivering.

The man who has been pursuing genuinely engaging work goals — relationships that are genuinely valued, activities that are pursued because they are meaningful rather than because they signal something — tends not to experience the emptiness of arrival in the same way. Because he has not been heading toward a destination. He has been living in a process. And processes, unlike destinations, do not end.

Status and its discontents

There is a subset of the success-feels-empty experience that deserves some attention. Status — the position in a hierarchy, the recognition of achievement, the social acknowledgement that you have done well — is a genuine human motivator. The research on social hierarchy and motivation is clear: status matters to people, it affects wellbeing, and its pursuit is neither trivial nor irrational.

What the research also shows, however, is that the wellbeing benefits of status are primarily produced by the relative increase in status rather than the absolute level. Moving from one level to the next produces the feeling. Being at the next level, once it has become familiar, produces nothing in particular. The man who spent ten years pursuing a senior position and who has occupied it for two years has adapted to it. It is now simply where he is. The next status increment is where the feeling was.

The problem with status as a primary motivational engine is that it is structurally self-defeating. There is nearly always a higher status. The increments produce diminishing returns. And the man who has organised his self-concept around his position in a hierarchy discovers, eventually, that his self-concept requires continuous maintenance — continuous advancement — to remain intact. The moment the advancement plateaus, which it does for almost everyone at some point, the self-concept loses its foundation. This is not a pleasant discovery. It tends to arrive around 42.

The comparison trap

The man who earns a good salary feels good about it until he discovers that a contemporarily comparable man earns more. The man who achieves a senior position is satisfied with it until he notices that someone he started with has achieved a more senior position. The man who owns a nice house is comfortable with it until the neighbourhood changes and his is no longer the nicest.

This is the normal operation of a social brain that evolved in small groups where relative position mattered enormously, and the absolute condition mattered considerably less. The brain assesses success relatively rather than absolutely, which means that any absolute level of success can be rendered insufficient by the existence of someone doing better.

The internet has made this significantly worse. The curated professional success of LinkedIn, the apparent achievement of everyone you have ever known presented in highlight reel form — the comparison environment that social media creates is one in which most people's actual circumstances compare unfavourably to most other people's presented ones. The man who would have felt successful in comparison to the range of outcomes visible in his immediate social circle now compares himself, involuntarily and continuously, against a global sample of apparent achievement that is specifically selected for its impressiveness. This is doing nobody any good.

What the 42-year-old is being told

The empty success feeling is, when examined honestly, not a problem. It is merely information. Specifically, it is the information that the goals that organised the first two decades of adult life are not the goals that will organise the next two. That the measures of success that were adopted at 25 — the extrinsic, comparative, achievement-based measures — are not producing the outcomes they promised. And that the question of what actually constitutes a good life, which was deferred in the press of getting on with the practical business of building one, has arrived and is requiring an answer.

This is the developmental purpose of the midlife reappraisal. Not to produce dissatisfaction for its own sake — there is nothing inherently virtuous about being unhappy with what you have — but to prompt the examination of whether the life being lived is the life that was actually chosen, or the life that the available options and the cultural script and the accumulated inertia of two decades produced.

You can fill the empty space

The research on what produces sustained wellbeing — as opposed to the temporary satisfaction of achievement — points consistently toward the same set of things that this site covers from various angles.

Relationships of genuine quality. Not the professional network. Not the couple of measurable professional achievement friendships maintained by social obligation. The relationships in which you are genuinely known, genuinely valued, and genuinely invested. The research on social connection and wellbeing, discussed in virtually every article on this site, is unambiguous. The quality of your relationships is a better predictor of your wellbeing than almost any professional achievement measurable.

Work that is intrinsically engaging. Not work that looks impressive. Work that is actually interesting — that produces the flow state described in my article on don't be embarrassed by your hobbies, that uses your actual capabilities, that connects to something you genuinely care about. The man who finds this, whether in his primary career or alongside it, has found something the salary comparison cannot diminish.

Contribution. The sense of having given something of genuine value — to people, to organisations, to a community, to something that will outlast the professional role. The contribution that is independent of the recognition it produces. The generativity that the psychologist Erikson identifies as the primary developmental task of midlife.

The small things, taken seriously. The research on what people report as the sources of genuine happiness — as opposed to the anticipated sources — consistently identifies ordinary, present-moment experiences: the meal, the conversation, the walk, the specific pleasure of a specific Tuesday that was not particularly remarkable and was nonetheless actually enjoyed. The man who is perpetually oriented toward the next achievement tends to be in the wrong relationship with these things. He is passing through them on the way to somewhere else. The somewhere else, when reached, will have the same problem.

In a nutshell

Success feels empty at 42 because the success that was pursued was largely of the kind that the brain adapts to rapidly. This is not a reason to abandon achievement. It's a reason to examine what is being achieved, and why, and whether the direction of the next twenty years might be calibrated against a slightly more reliable set of coordinates than the ones that organised the first twenty.

The coordinates are available. They involve connection, meaning, genuine engagement and the willingness to ask what you actually want rather than what the 25-year-old version of you decided would constitute success. The 25-year-old version of you, it should be said, was working with limited information. You have considerably more of it now, so use it.