‘Life is hard, so work hard’ was the message I received from my parental home. One has to work strenuously and unendingly, essentially resigning one's own wants and desires, and if all goes well, success will come some day. Pleasure can wait till then. I soon realized that this day is likely to arrive only in the afterlife.

This core belief ran in my family for many generations, a script of survival and coping in adverse times. In this world, there was no place for individual pastimes, sport or even for watching the clouds. Joy sneaked in through the presence of children, with whom the adults ‘had to’ play. The adult world didn't have its own tools for how to be happy, to play or just to ‘be’, at all.

It resonated with my experiences in public policy. Working at the Budget Department of the Hungarian Ministry of Finance, most of my colleagues had the strong view that the economy needs to grow, to grow a great deal more before we can afford to think of anything ‘green’ or ‘social’.

In the media and everyday talk, Hungarians felt frustrated at lagging behind their rich Austrian neighbour, while being rather indifferent about their own affluence compared to their Ukrainian or Romanian neighbours. There was a collective conviction as to the key to success: we need to strive with gritted teeth to catch up, and finally when this happens, we can finally start enjoying our good life or care about ‘higher issues’ such as creativity, poorer people or the environment. Actually, most held little hope that this catching up would happen in our own lifetime. The good life was relegated to the future.

The idea of infinite growth, fuelled by individual strenuous work effort, has not yet created a good life for all on the planet. And it has proved to lead to an overuse of natural resources and the overheating of the planet. Yet many of us seem to still hold on to it.

Our individual or collective recipes for success often remain tacit and tend to be taken as if they were laws of nature such as gravity or the change of seasons. It creates a blind spot that limits our ability to live a thriving life and to adapt to the new challenges we face.