Op-ed: Borka Schuster
Ten years ago, if you'd asked me what I wanted from life, I would have answered without hesitation: I want to be successful. And back then, I had a very precise idea of what that meant. A good title. Growing responsibility. Financial security. A career other people would nod at approvingly. A life that, from the outside, quietly announced: things are going well.
For a long time, I believed the path was a straight line. Work hard, keep growing, keep delivering, and one day you arrive at the point where you finally feel content. But the years brought me something completely different from what I expected.
Because the more items I ticked off my imaginary list, the more that feeling of contentment seemed to stay one step ahead of me.
By 37, I finally learned that success and contentment are not the same thing
Our idea of success is largely handed to us from the outside. Even as children, we start collecting the messages that tell us what society considers valuable: what job you have, how much you earn, how much responsibility you carry, what kind of house you live in, what school your kids attend, how many people think you're important or talented.
And here's the tricky part: the markers of success are almost always comparable. There's always someone with a higher title, a bigger salary, a nicer address. That's what makes success such a strange goal. It's easy to reach a milestone, but hard to truly arrive. By the time you get there, new markers have already appeared on the horizon.
After a while, I caught myself doing exactly that: constantly watching the next rung on the ladder. What's next? Where should I improve? What else should I achieve? And meanwhile, I was asking myself a far more important question less and less often.
Am I actually happy with the life I'm building?
Not with how it looks from the outside. But with how it feels from the inside. Somewhere in the second half of my thirties, I started to really understand that contentment comes from a completely different place. Not from what other people think of me, but from how true I am to myself.
Whether I'm doing work I genuinely love. Not every single day, not every minute, but on the whole. Do I start the week with a good feeling, or does my stomach clench at the thought of Monday morning?
I realized that it matters just as much to me whether I'm working with people I respect. People who don't treat every collaboration as a competition. Whether I'm nurturing relationships that fill me up rather than drain me. Whether I have time left for the things that actually matter to me.
These are things that are much harder to show on a résumé or a LinkedIn profile. Maybe that's exactly why we talk about them less. And yet today they feel far more defining to me than any external status symbol.
At 37, I'm no longer especially concerned with how successful other people think my life is. I'm far more interested in how I feel inside it. There's always more money to earn, more responsibility to take on, one more project to run.
But contentment doesn't wait at the next station. It lives right here, in the moments when I feel that my life is in tune with who I truly am. And to me, that now matters more than any outward achievement.
What is the difference between success and contentment?
Success is usually measured from the outside and against other people, while contentment comes from within. As the article puts it, success is easy to chase but hard to arrive at, whereas contentment is felt in the present when your life aligns with who you are.
Why does chasing success rarely feel satisfying?
Because the markers of success are always comparable, there's always a higher goal ahead. The more you tick off the list, the more that sense of "enough" seems to stay one step ahead of you.
How do you know if you're living an authentic life?
According to the piece, it's about how life feels on the inside rather than how it looks on the outside: whether you enjoy your work overall, work with people you respect, keep relationships that energize you, and have time for what truly matters.
Is it wrong to still want career success at 37?
No. The author isn't rejecting ambition, but shifting priorities: caring less about how successful others think her life is, and more about how she actually feels within it.
