What does it mean to have made it?

The question sounds simple, but the answer seems to change depending on where you learned to ask it.

For us, the answer was never entirely Korean nor entirely Brazilian. We are both Korean, but we grew up in Brazil. We learned to speak Portuguese, went to international schools, ate Korean food at home and Brazilian food outside it, and learned — sometimes consciously and sometimes not — to move between two very different ways of imagining a successful life.

In Korea, there is a familiar guideline to having “made it.” Study hard. Get good grades. Enter a good university. Build a respectable career. Earn enough to buy a good home. Get married. Build a family. Give your children opportunities, perhaps even better ones than you had. Somewhere along the way, become the kind of person whose life can be recognized by others as successful.

Not every Korean follows this path, of course. And more and more Koreans are challenging it. But the existence of the path itself is difficult to miss.

Education is particularly powerful in this equation. Historically, it has been understood as one of the clearest routes to social mobility.

During the Joseon Dynasty, the civil service examination system offered a path to government positions based, at least in principle, on merit. After the devastation of the Korean War, education took on an even greater role. Keeping schools and examinations going amid the destruction represented continuity, hope and preparation for a future that did not yet exist.

When Korea began rebuilding, it had few natural resources to rely on. What it did have was its people. Massive investments in literacy, universal schooling and education helped create the skilled workforce that fueled the country’s extraordinary economic transformation.

For a country that transformed itself from poverty into one of the world's most advanced economies within a few generations, the logic is understandable. You work hard, become educated, move upward and give the next generation an even better starting point.

For the most part, it worked.

Perhaps one of the strange consequences of a society built around the idea of moving up is that, eventually, moving upward can become an end in itself.

Today, that legacy is still visible in the intensity of Korea’s education culture. In 2024, 80 percent of Korean elementary, middle and high school students participated in private education, spending an average of 7.6 hours a week on it. Education is not simply about grades. It remains closely tied to opportunity, status and security.

From that point on, the question changes from “What kind of life do I want?” to “What kind of life will show that I succeeded?”

That distinction matters because when we start questioning what we actually want from life, one of the first answers that comes to mind is happiness.

Professor Suh Eun-kook, who has studied happiness for more than 30 years and is the author of "The Origins of Happiness," puts it simply: Happiness is eating a meal with someone you love. Research suggests that two of the most pleasurable everyday activities are eating and talking. Despite living in an increasingly complex and civilized world, our brains still find deep pleasure in these basic experiences of food and company.

Suh argues that happiness is not a destination, but a process. From an evolutionary perspective, humans do not live simply to be happy, but the capacity to experience happiness helps us survive. Happiness is deeply connected to the frequency of meaningful experiences like shared meals, conversation and connection rather than simply the intensity of occasional highs.

Money follows a similar pattern. When we actively need it for food, housing and security, earning more can be profoundly rewarding. But once basic needs are met and people become financially secure, research suggests that money’s ability to increase well-being becomes weaker.

This raises an uncomfortable question: If the things we spend so much of our lives pursuing eventually become less powerful sources of happiness, what exactly are we trying to achieve?

Korea’s happiness data adds another layer. The 2026 World Happiness Report places Korea 67th out of 147 countries based on people's self-assessments of their lives between 2023 and 2025. An Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development report found that Korean life satisfaction rose from 5.7 in 2013 to 6.4 in 2023, although it remained below the average of 7.3.

The number itself does not tell us why people feel the way they do, nor does it mean that Koreans are simply unhappy. But they made us wonder whether the things that make a life look successful are necessarily the same things that make it feel successful.

And maybe this is where our experience of growing up in Brazil became important.

Brazil is hardly a country without ambition, inequality, insecurity or intense competition. Brazilians also care deeply about education, money, professional achievement and social status. It would be naive to romanticize Brazil as a place where everyone simply chooses happiness over success.

And yet, we noticed that the language around a good life can feel different: weekends with family, long lunches, friendships, travel, celebrations or simply having time to enjoy the life that work is supposed to support.

This is not uniquely Brazilian, nor is it true of every Brazilian. But there seemed to be a cultural permission to say that life should be enjoyed along the way.

Being Korean abroad did not necessarily make us free from cultural expectations. We simply had the opportunity to see some of them from the outside.

Growing up between Korea and Brazil gave us two different vocabularies for adulthood. One emphasized education, responsibility, stability and achievement. The other made more visible the value of enjoyment, relationships and having time to live the life that work was supposed to support.

Maybe the most important thing this experience has taught us is that there is no universal definition of having made it.

For some people, it is a prestigious career. For others, it is owning a home, raising children, caring for parents, traveling, creating something beautiful, building a community or simply waking up and liking the life they have built.

We still work hard. We still care about achievement. We are proud of our education and careers. We are not writing this as people who rejected the Korean dream and discovered a better one.

But perhaps growing up between cultures gave us the privilege — and sometimes the discomfort — of asking a question that is easy to postpone: When we say we made it, whose definition of success are we using?

Chyung Eun-ju (ejchyung@snu.ac.kr) is a tech research associate at Donghyun ASP. She earned both her bachelor's in business and master's in marketing from Seoul National University. Joel Cho (joelywcho@gmail.com) is a practicing lawyer specializing in intellectual property and digital law.