Most of us have never actually tested this. We assume success is the goal, arrange our lives around reaching it, and never quite get around to checking whether the assumption holds.
Daniel Hartman, in Chisoku, gets to test it, because I gave him no choice — he already has the money, the freedom, the thing everyone else is still chasing, and the novel starts precisely where most stories about success would end. That was the point of writing it that way. I wanted to ask what's actually left once the goal has been reached and hasn't, in fact, resolved anything.
What's left, in his case, is an old VW van, a dog, two guinea pigs, a talking cockatiel, and a country full of ordinary people who turn out to know something he doesn't. Which is a strange place to end up after nine years of quietly winning.
I suspect this is closer to universal than the novel's premise makes it sound. Success, once reached, has an odd habit of not staying reached. It converts almost immediately into a new baseline, and the goalposts that were supposed to be the finish line turn out to have wheels.
So what happens when success stops being the goal? In my experience, and in Daniel's, something has to replace it — and the honest answer is that it's rarely another goal of the same shape. It's usually something slower and less measurable: attention, relationship, the particular satisfaction of a day well spent rather than a milestone reached. None of that photographs well. All of it seems to matter more, once you've actually arrived at the milestone and looked around.