Time & Perspective Quote by Bo Bennett

Bennett’s line lands like a CFO’s audit of the soul: show me the definition, or admit you don’t know what you’re optimizing for. Coming from a businessman, it borrows the logic of strategy decks and personal branding - the premise that vague goals produce wasted motion. The sting is in the second clause, framed as a quietly accusatory question. It suggests that many lives are run on default settings: chasing status, comfort, approval, or the next milestone because those metrics are easy to measure, not because they’re meaningful.

The intent is motivational, but it’s also corrective. Bennett isn’t romanticizing happiness; he’s operationalizing it. “Define” is the keyword, pushing happiness out of the realm of mood and into the realm of values, boundaries, and tradeoffs. If happiness is “freedom,” you’ll spend differently. If it’s “belonging,” you’ll choose proximity over prestige. The subtext is that modern ambition is often outsourced: algorithms, workplace incentives, and social comparison hand you a ready-made target, and you call it desire.

There’s a cultural context humming underneath: the self-help/business crossover where life is treated like a startup and identity like a product. That framing can feel bracingly practical - and a little bleak. It implies the tragedy isn’t that happiness is hard to attain, but that we’re competent strivers chasing an undefined brief, burning years on deliverables no one actually ordered.