I pursued the ever-so-just-out-of-reach 'American Dream' for 45+ years (i.e. 'keeping up with the Jones's', which morphed into 'not only keeping up, but blasting by the Jones's and spraying them with your gravel and leaving them in your dust'.) I found, to my eventual horror and chagrin, that doing so left me as emotionally empty and bereft of actual happiness as if I had only ever endeavored to remove emotion and happiness from my life in the first place.