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I bought nearly everything the happiness industry was selling. The one thing it never offered was the question I actually needed.
By Sonny Garg
At the lowest point of my outwardly successful life, my nightstand held a tower of books about purpose, meaning, and the secret rituals of happy Scandinavians. I was taking cold showers, practicing breathing protocols, and drinking apple cider vinegar for reasons I can no longer reconstruct. I had approached my unhappiness the way I had approached everything else in my career: as a project to be productively managed with best practices. I was, in short, the happiness industrial complex’s ideal customer.
I want to be careful about what I am claiming here. This is not a takedown of any particular practice, and it is definitely not an announcement that I have found the alternative. I am suspicious of anyone selling answers to a question this old, and that includes me. What I have is a customer review from someone who bought nearly everything, and one question I wish any of those books had thought to ask me.
Here is what the industry sells, underneath the branding: optimization. The premise of nearly every offering is that you are a basically sound machine running suboptimal settings. Adjust the inputs, the promise goes, the sleep, the gratitude, the morning light, and the outputs will improve. And to be fair, sometimes they do. Cold showers wake you up. Breathing exercises calm you down. The problem is not the practices. The problem is what the premise quietly assumes: that the problem is your settings.
Mine was not. I had spent five decades measuring my worth by my accomplishments, a habit installed in childhood and reinforced by every promotion since. By the time I reached the executive committee of a Fortune 125 company, I had achieved my way to the top of a life I could not feel. The wellness stack did not challenge that operating system. It joined it. My meditation streak became another metric. My sleep score became another report card. My morning routine was, in retrospect, achievement addiction wearing athleisure. I was not treating the disease. I was giving it a smoothie.
So the first question I learned to ask of any practice, book, or protocol: what am I actually hiring this to do? Not its advertised benefit, but the real job. When I finally asked, the honest answer was uncomfortable. I was not trying to become healthier. I was trying to become enough, and I was hoping eleven minutes of deliberate breathing might close a gap that no habit had ever closed.
The second question: if this worked, how would I know? Every project I had ever run in business had a definition of done. My self-improvement project had none. There was no amount of optimized that would have felt finished, for the same reason no promotion had ever felt finished. The finish line was not fixed. It moved. Any program whose endpoint keeps receding is not a program. It is a treadmill with better marketing.
Which leads to the question none of the books asked, the one it took a health crisis and a great deal of unwanted stillness for me to hear: who told me I was not enough to begin with? Because that verdict did not come from my sleep habits. It was handed to me early, by people who had been handed it themselves, and every optimization since had been an appeal of a sentence I never thought to question. The happiness industry kept offering me better ways to serve the sentence. What I needed was to reopen the case.
I still take the occasional cold shower. I still breathe deliberately when the old panic visits, and it visits. The practices were never the problem. The problem was what I was asking of them, which was to answer a question about worth that no protocol can touch. So before adding the next habit to the stack, it may be worth sitting, unoptimized, with the harder question underneath it. Not: how do I become happier? But: who decided I was not enough as is, and why am I still taking their word for it?
Sonny Garg is the author of Desi 2.0: My Family’s American Dream and the Cost of Never Being Enough, (Amplify Publishing, August 4, 2026) , a memoir exploring achievement addiction, immigrant identity, and the search for meaning beyond success. A graduate of the University of Chicago and Harvard, Garg was a White House Fellow and rose to executive leadership in a Fortune 125 company. Yet despite achieving many of the milestones he had spent his life pursuing, he found himself asking a difficult question: why didn’t success make him feel successful? Through his writing and speaking, Garg explores how inherited expectations shape our identities and how we can create lives defined not only by achievement, but by connection and belonging.Learn more at Sonny Garg.
