#88🌅 What Does Happiness Even Mean?
Learning to ask the questions I was never allowed to ask.
Welcome to Tech Atypically 👋, your weekly blog for navigating the challenges of ADHD and being in the tech industry.
I am an ADHD and product management coach helping you change one belief and take one action each week.
🐼Do you work in Tech and are tired of struggling? Get ADHD and job skill coaching with Tech Atypically.
Part 1 of the Finding Happiness Series
🦋The Takeaways
Belief: Happiness is a selfish luxury I'm not entitled to pursue.
Reality: Happiness isn't just about money or survival - it's about allowing yourself to explore what truly fulfills you.
Action: Start allowing yourself to explore what makes you happy.
⭐️Introduction
I'm starting a new series about something I don’t know much about - finding happiness and fulfillment. Here's the thing though - I don't actually know much about either of those things.
As a 40-year-old son of second-generation immigrants who came to the U.S. undocumented and built themselves up from poverty to small business owners, I've never really allowed myself to ask: "What makes me happy?".
I know how to work, put the family first, and shove all my feelings deep down so I can work harder. I’m a walking stereotype of what it is to be a good Asian son, minus the being a doctor part.
The irony isn't lost on me that I've reached a point in my life that my parents dreamed of - a career outside of a restaurant, financial stability, health insurance - and yet I'm not sure what happiness means to me.
Join me as I begin to allow myself to look for personal happiness and come to terms with what I want my life to be.
😵💫The Belief
In my Thai and Chinese culture, there's a pervasive belief that happiness is a selfish pursuit. The collective, or the family, always comes before the individual. Work isn't meant to fulfill you - it's meant to provide stability. Success means surviving, not thriving.
If you somehow make enough for yourself, you take on more to help others in your family that don’t.
From my earliest memories, the message was clear: work harder, always harder. There was no room for questions about personal fulfillment when we were always just a few steps away from losing everything.
The immigrant myth told me that if I just worked hard enough and made enough money, everything would naturally fall into place.
The myth taught me to believe I was just one step away from having it all.
One more job.
One hour on the clock.
One more school sport or activity deferred for work.
One more dollar.
The family would achieve happiness.
And then maybe I could be happy.
Turns out that was only partly true.
🤝The Reality
I've reached a point in my life that's more stable than ever before. I make enough money to not think about what we spend on food. Something unimaginable growing up.
My career is dependent on my brain and not my body. I don’t have to serve tables or cook. If I wake up sick one day, I still get paid because I have paid sick time. All luxuries my parents never had.
By my parents' definition, I should be content. But I've discovered something unexpected - money doesn't create happiness, it just makes certain things easier.
The reality is that I've been avoiding these questions about happiness and fulfillment because they feel somehow forbidden. As if asking "What makes me happy?" is a betrayal of my parents' sacrifices. As if wanting more than survival is ungrateful.
But maybe the greatest honor I can give to my parents' struggles is to allow myself to seek more than just survival. Maybe it's time to challenge the belief that security is the ceiling of what I'm allowed to want.
🛠️The Action
Over the next 12+ weeks, I'm going to explore happiness and fulfillment through:
Experimentation with format - Testing whether long-form writing still brings me joy, trying video and podcast formats, and collaborating with others to tell these stories in new ways.
Asking uncomfortable questions - Getting underneath the "shoulds" and fears to understand what truly makes me happy, not just what I think should make me happy.
Challenging inherited beliefs - Examining whether the stories I learned about work, happiness, and success still serve me.
Exploring what thriving looks like - Yes, the pay in tech helps me get by but that doesn’t matter if I don’t have the space or time to explore what my life is outside of the job.
✨Conclusion
To be clear, I’m not criticizing the survival strategies of my immigrant family. It was an effective strategy that helped us survive long enough to get where we are now. I’m grateful for their lessons.
It’s got me where I am today but they’re not the same lessons and values I want to pass down to my child. Nor continue to live by today. It’s time to update them but I’m not sure how.
I don't have the answers yet. I'm not even sure I'm asking the right questions. But after 40 years of focusing on survival, I'm ready to explore what it means to be happy, wherever it happens to take me.
Note: I’ll probably be off through the new year. Or maybe not, we’ll see where my ADHD takes me.
🐼Get ADHD coaching for the job, behavioral challenges, and executive communication all in one place.
⏭️Next Week
How to create a vision for yourself.