I was addressing a room full of management professionals recently. Highly paid, highly caffeinated, highly strung, smug people who haven’t slept since Q2. During the discussion, one brave soul asked a question that, judging by the nods around the room, seemed to occupy everyone’s thoughts.
“How do I stay motivated to look forward to the future? I have a good job and a comfortable life, so why don’t I feel happy?” A loud ‘Yayy’went in unison. I smiled and asked him a question in return. “When was the last time you truly paused?”
You know the kind of pause I mean. Not the 30-second pause between emails. I mean the kind of pause where you simply stop. Where you breathe deeply, notice the world around you, look at a tree, listen to birds or simply sit with your own thoughts without a screen demanding your attention. A moment to check in with yourself rather than your notifications. He laughed. “I don’t have the luxury of time.” And there it is. The official motto of the new gen. “I’m too busy to be human”. Perhaps that has become the defining phrase of modern life. We have become so busy managing our lives that we have forgotten how to experience them. We have upgraded almost everything around us. Except ourselves.
Technology is faster. Our devices know our habits before we do. Yet somewhere along the way, we stopped investing in the one thing that matters most: In ourselves. We live in a world of curated reality. Nothing is allowed to just ‘Be’ anymore. Least of all our food. We eat things that were picked raw, shipped across oceans, and taught to ripen in a truck. Vegetables that look like they belong on a magazine cover but taste like disappointment.
Fast food engineered in a lab to be addictive, not nourishing. We have preserved, enhanced, genetically modified and photoshopped everything to look beautiful… and mostly empty. We have applied much the same philosophy to ourselves. Gym, filters, cosmetic enhancements, yoga retreats in Bali that cost more than Bali. We spend fortunes to polish the outside while the inside is running on four hours of sleep and spite..!
We pursue stronger bodies, younger faces and perfectly curated lives, while quietly accepting chronic stress, exhaustion and emotional fatigue as the price of success. Outwardly, we may appear healthier than previous generations. Inwardly, many of us feel disconnected, overwhelmed and constantly in search of something we cannot quite define.
We may look better than our grandparents, but inside? A lot of us feel hollow. Happiness is annoyingly simple, boring and low tech. The answer isn’t another productivity hack. It’s going back to basics. A meal prepared from fresh ingredients, food that actually came from the ground with nothing else added to it. A conversation without distraction. No podcast. No playlist. Just you.
Remember that happiness isn’t loud. It is unhurried. It is a song that makes you grin for no reason. The mist on a hill. A peacock dancing in the rain. Morning light filtering through the trees. Music that unexpectedly stirs a memory. The quiet comfort of someone you love walking through the door. It’s the stuff we used to call “spontaneous” before we scheduled it out of our lives.
And did I mention our curiosity? Curiosity is great. It has given us science, medicine and the internet and of course the irreplaceable delivery at 2am. But we got greedy and went from “how can we improve this?” to “how can we stop aging, build humanoids, and find a backup planet just in case?” Technology will upskill you first, then downsize you. Then it will send you a calendar invite to your own replacement. There’s a fine line between curiosity and foolishness. Wisdom is knowing when to stop. Common sense is remembering to. Finally, while we are at it, let’s nail success and happiness.
Perhaps nowhere is this confusion more evident than in the way we define success. Success and happiness are often treated as though they are interchangeable. Success is all about your net worth while Happiness is all about your self-worth. And if you only chase the first one, you can be rich, busy, and still ask that guy’s question in a conference room at 3pm on a Wednesday. The world doesn’t need more speed or hustle. It needs more calm, more real food, real people. Less performing and more Living. It needs love. It needs healing and peace and people who remember how to be human. So maybe it’s time for a quiet shift.
Less scrolling. More sky.
Less perfect. More being.
Less racing. More living.
The world will wait. The question is, Will You?
Jani Viswanath PhD is a humanitarian, artist, author and film producer who believes in the power of storytelling to inspire peace and empathy. She is dedicated to uplifting lives with stories that bridge cultures and has meaningful impact across communities worldwide.
