The happiest people may not be the ones who found what they were looking for — they’re the ones who stopped keeping score

by Lachlan Brown | May 13, 2026, 10:53 am

I had a list in my mid-twenties. It wasn’t written down anywhere formal, but it was clear in my head. By 30, I wanted to have a business making six figures. By 32, I wanted to build something meaningful. By 35, a wife, a kid, a body of work I was proud of.

I hit every single one.

And the strangest thing happened when I did. Nothing. I mean, there was a brief flash of satisfaction each time, like scratching an itch. But the itch always came back, immediately, wearing a slightly different outfit. The goalposts moved before I even finished celebrating.

It took me until about 36, sitting at a quiet dinner with my wife and daughter over a simple, inexpensive meal, to realize something that psychology has been trying to tell us for decades: the happiest people aren’t the ones who found what they were looking for. They’re the ones who stopped treating life like a scorecard.

The treadmill nobody talks about

In 1971, psychologists Philip Brickman and Donald Campbell introduced a concept they called the hedonic treadmill. Their research, later expanded in a landmark 1978 study, compared the happiness levels of lottery winners, people who had become paraplegic through accidents, and a control group. What they found defied common sense: lottery winners were not significantly happier than the control group, and accident victims were not as unhappy as you’d expect. Both groups had largely returned to their baseline levels of happiness.

The implication is brutal in its simplicity. No matter how hard you chase the thing you think will make you happy, your brain adapts. The new car, the promotion, the bigger apartment, the milestone birthday goal. You get a spike, then you’re back to where you started. And then you need the next thing.

That’s the treadmill. You keep running, but you don’t actually get anywhere. And the act of keeping score, of constantly measuring where you are against where you think you should be, is what keeps you on it.

Happy people process comparison differently

There’s a study by psychologist Sonja Lyubomirsky that I think about a lot. Her research on the hedonic consequences of social comparison found something that seems obvious but is actually quite profound: happy and unhappy people respond to comparison information in fundamentally different ways.

Unhappy people’s mood and self-assessment were heavily influenced by how a peer performed, whether better or worse. Their sense of how they were doing was constantly being recalibrated against external benchmarks. Happy people, on the other hand, were largely unaffected by upward comparison. Seeing someone outperform them didn’t diminish their own sense of satisfaction.

In other words, happy people hadn’t found a way to win the comparison game. They’d simply stopped playing it.

This aligns with what the Association for Psychological Science has noted about our tendency to measure ourselves against milestone markers and round-number goals. We naturally seek quantitative evidence of our progress, birthdays, income targets, follower counts, and we tie our sense of wellbeing to these external yardsticks. The research suggests this scorekeeping impulse, while natural, actively works against sustained happiness.

What the longest happiness study actually found

The Harvard Study of Adult Development has been running for over 85 years, making it the longest scientific study of happiness ever conducted. Researchers have tracked hundreds of participants from their teens into old age, examining what actually predicts a good life.

The study’s director, psychiatrist Robert Waldinger, has summarized the findings bluntly: the biggest predictor of happiness and health in later life wasn’t career achievement, wealth, exercise, or diet. It was the quality of a person’s relationships. People who had warm, trusting connections with others were happier, healthier, and lived longer. People who were isolated, regardless of their material success, declined faster in every measurable way.

What strikes me most about this research is what it doesn’t say. It doesn’t say the happiest people had the best relationships on paper. It says they felt they could count on someone when things got hard. That’s not a metric. You can’t score it. You can’t put it on a list and check it off. It’s a felt experience, and it only exists in the present tense.

The moment you try to quantify your relationships, to keep score of who called whom last or who gave more, the quality of the connection erodes. The happiest people in the study weren’t tracking. They were just showing up.

When I stopped keeping score

I can’t pinpoint exactly when it happened, but I know what helped. Meditation. Years of sitting with my own mind and watching how desperately it wants to measure, rank, compare, and evaluate.

Because my brain loves keeping score. It’s good at it. When our content business hit a new traffic record, my first thought wasn’t satisfaction. It was “what’s the next target?” When I ran my fastest 5k time, I didn’t enjoy it for even a full day before I started thinking about how to go faster. When my daughter hit a new developmental milestone, I caught myself measuring it against where other kids were at her age.

That’s the scorekeeping mind. And it will consume every good thing in your life if you let it.

What changed for me, gradually, was learning to notice the score without believing it matters. The number still appears in my head. But I’ve gotten better at letting it pass through without acting on it. Better at sitting with “this is good” without immediately adding “but it could be better.”

Satisfaction isn’t something you achieve. It’s something you allow.

This is the part that’s hardest to explain to people who are still deep in the achievement cycle. Because from the outside, stopping keeping score looks like complacency. Like giving up. Like lowering your standards.

It’s not. I still work hard. I still run. I still try to be a better father and husband and writer than I was last month. The difference is that I’m no longer doing those things to fill a gap. I’m doing them because they’re worth doing, independent of where they land me on some imaginary leaderboard.

There’s a meaningful difference between growth and scorekeeping. Growth says: I want to get better at this because the process matters to me. Scorekeeping says: I need to hit this number so I can feel like I’m enough. Growth is open-ended and sustainable. Scorekeeping is exhausting and never finished.

The research keeps telling us the same thing from every angle. The hedonic treadmill shows that chasing milestones doesn’t produce lasting happiness. Social comparison research shows that tying your self-worth to how you stack up against others makes you miserable. The longest running happiness study in history shows that the things we can’t measure, warmth, trust, presence, are the things that matter most.

And yet most of us spend our lives optimizing for things we can put on a spreadsheet.

Lachlan Brown

Lachlan Brown is an entrepreneur and co-founder of Brown Brothers Media, a digital publishing network reaching tens of millions of readers monthly. He holds a Graduate Diploma of Psychological Studies from Deakin University, though his real education came afterward: a warehouse job shifting TVs, a stretch of anxiety in his mid-twenties, and the slow discovery that studying the mind is not the same as learning how to live well. He started experimenting with Buddhist principles during breaks at the warehouse and eventually began writing about what he was learning. That writing became Hack Spirit, a widely read personal development site, and his book Hidden Secrets of Buddhism became a bestseller. His work breaks down complex ideas into frameworks people can apply immediately, whether they are navigating a career change, a difficult relationship, or the gap between knowing what to do and actually doing it. Lachlan splits his time between Singapore and Saigon. He writes about high-performance routines, decision-making under pressure, digital innovation, and the intersection of Eastern philosophy with modern life. His perspective comes from having built things from scratch, failed at some of them, and learned that clarity comes from practice, not theory.