Don't be confused about LIFE. | By Sawan Kumar | Best Career Coach

If you are confused about life, money, and happiness, you are not alone — but you are likely wrong about all three in ways that are costing you every single day.

Direct Answer: Most people are confused about life, money, and happiness because they treat money as a destination rather than a vehicle, buy things to impress people they do not even like, and mistake short-term pleasure from material purchases for genuine, lasting fulfilment. Clarity comes when you separate utility from identity, and when you stop outsourcing the definition of success to your neighbours and social feeds.

The Sentence That Exposes How Confused We Are

There is one sentence I use with my students — across 79,000+ learners in 74+ courses — that stops people cold: we are spending money we do not have, on things we do not need, to impress people we do not like.

Read that again. If it stings even slightly, that is the signal. You already know you are not making choices for yourself. You are making choices for an audience that is barely paying attention. The confusion about life, money, and happiness does not start with ignorance. It starts with knowing the truth and repeating the mistake anyway — every single day.

That is not a knowledge problem. That is a clarity problem.

Money Is a Vehicle, Not the Destination

Here is the exact confusion most people carry: they connect being rich, being successful, and being wealthy — all three — entirely to having a lot of money. And then in the same breath, they admit that money will not make them happy. I ask two questions in every session on this topic:

• Question 1: How many of you think money will make you happy? Almost no one raises a hand.
• Question 2: How many of you want a lot of money? Every single hand goes up.

That gap — that contradiction — is where the confusion lives. And the way out is not to want less money. There is nothing wrong with wanting or needing money. In today's world, money is directly tied to solving problems, reducing friction, and creating options. You cannot help yourself or others without it.

The correction is this: money is a utility. It is a vehicle. Like a car, a motorcycle, a mobile phone, or a private jet — it is a tool that helps you get somewhere. The moment you start buying a car not for its utility but to show it off to your neighbour, you have turned a utility into a status prop. And now you are not driving the car. The car is driving you.

Mother Teresa and Gandhi Prove the Point

When I bring up Mother Teresa and Mahatma Gandhi in this context, people sometimes push back. But stay with me. Mother Teresa was successful. She was rich. She was wealthy. And she travelled with a single small bag. During her last days, she lived in a small room with almost nothing physical around her. By every conventional metric of 2024, she would register as broke. By any honest definition of rich, wealthy, and successful — she was all three.

Gandhi had even less in material terms. No money, no assets, no possessions worth counting. But the man bent the direction of history. Rich? Wealthy? Successful? Without question.

The point is not that you should give up money or live with one bag. The point is that the current generation has started connecting everything to money, and that is precisely where we are going wrong. Being rich means being rich in health, in ethics, in culture, in relationships, in contribution — not only in rupees, dirhams, or dollars.

Why Material Things Only Make You Happy for a Short Time

Think about the last large purchase you made — a phone upgrade, a car, a holiday you stretched to afford. How long did the happiness last? Be honest. A week? A month? Then it normalised, and the baseline reset, and you were scanning the horizon for the next thing.

That is the hedonic treadmill in action, and it is the clearest proof that material things give you a feeling of success for a very limited period of time. It is not a character flaw. It is how the brain works. The mistake is building your entire financial and lifestyle strategy around something that resets every few months.

The deeper question — and this one takes real work — is: what makes you happy from within? What gives you fulfilment that does not have an expiry date? That answer is not the same for everyone. No coach, no book, no course, and certainly not a YouTube algorithm can hand it to you packaged and ready. You have to find it yourself. And the reason it is yours to find is that you are unique. You are the only person who can help you.

How to Start Getting Clarity on Life, Money, and Happiness

The path I recommend — as a Chartered Accountant who has spent years thinking analytically about what actually produces results — is not complicated, but it is deliberate:

• Separate utility from identity. Before every significant purchase, ask: am I buying this because it solves a real problem, or because of what it signals to others?
• Audit your inputs. You have thousands of years of distilled human experience in books and audio books sitting in front of you. Successful people have already lived the experiments. Read their conclusions. Listen to how they separated the noise from what actually mattered.
• Define rich for yourself. Write down what rich means to you in health, in relationships, in ethics, in work — not just in your bank balance. If the list is only numbers, the definition is incomplete.
• Track what actually sustains your happiness. Not what gives you a spike. What keeps you at a higher baseline over weeks and months. That is your data. That is what to optimise for.
• Stop copying your neighbour's strategy. You do not know their full balance sheet — financial or emotional. Buying what they buy to feel what you think they feel is the most expensive guessing game in human history.

The Only Direction That Matters Is Inward

Nobody can show you the right direction other than yourself. That is not a motivational line — it is the structural reality of the problem. Because you are unique, the answer to what makes your life feel rich, your happiness feel real, and your use of money feel aligned has to come from your own self-knowledge. External guides, teachers, coaches — and I include myself in that list — can only give you frameworks. You have to run the experiment on your own life.

The confusion about life, money, and happiness ends when you stop waiting for someone to hand you the answer and start treating the question as the most important research project of your life.

Start today with one question: in the last 90 days, what made you genuinely happy — not for an hour, but for weeks? Write down three things. That list is more valuable than any financial plan that ignores it.