Happiness Before Success

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Here's a cognitive bias of mine that I have trouble admitting but have found to be invariably present for a long time. It always starts with "after". "After I achieve X, I'll start/continue Y". Typically Y is something that I know makes me happy, but X takes precedence because of some level of urgency. In the days leading up to a major academic conference deadline, I may deprioritize spending time with friends, exercising, or preparing home-cooked meals in favor of finishing up a paper. At a larger scale, I overlooked these smaller habits for several months when I was applying to grad school. I thought it was a harmless adjustment. After all, I could just continue doing these things once I got into grad school, right?

But this kind of thinking contradicts the way our brains are wired. Once we reach a point that we believe is good for us, we're not going to start acting completely different. Because as far as our brain is concerned, our previous habits are a winning formula. Why change what works? In other words, if it ain't broke, don't fix it.

As I write this I'm roughly four months into starting grad school, and unfortunately it is not trivial to just continue habits after an extended hiatus. In general, I thought that I could first focus on achieving some form of success and worry about my own happiness after. What I didn't realize is that there's always the next thing. Once I submit one paper to an academic conference, I'm thinking about the next one, and the one after that. Now that I'm a grad student, there's fellowships to apply to and internships to search for. The bar for success continues to rise indefinitely and there's no hard ceiling.

The "after" moment never arrives on its own. So although I'm now in a position that my past self would consider remarkable, I'm still not spending as much time with friends as I wanted to. I do get more time to exercise but sometimes I won't take advantage of it. This comes down to a problem of identity. The version of me that did a bunch of research and got into grad school did so by focusing all their time on work. If I now deviate from that version of me, I incur the risk of no longer being capable of those things. Of course, this risk is very impractical, but it's rooted in our subconscious tendencies to play it safe and keep things the way they are. So I'd rather now switch every "after" with "before". Before I go out and pursue the big goals I want to achieve, I'll make sure I'm currently still doing all the things I know are good for me. Then, once the desired goal is achieved, there's no need to backtrack and find ways to be happy again.

This is not to say that making sacrifices to achieve demanding goals somehow turned me into an unhappy person. In retrospect, I still believe the extra time I put into my work was worth it. But this mentality is a very slippery slope to navigate. In my experience, it's very easy to indefinitely prioritize the next big goal and realize several years later that you completely lost touch of the things that brought you happiness in life. Putting your happiness first ensures that you'll actually get to enjoy the fruits of your labor instead of wondering where it all went wrong.