Leadership Beyond the Happiness–Meaning Binary in Turbulent Times

It is late evening in some boardroom, perhaps in Mumbai, Frankfurt or Singapore — take your pick. The screens have frozen, the coffee has gone cold, and yet the room is nowhere close to a decision. A currency swing has quietly redrawn the import bill. Energy prices are spiking again as the Strait of Hormuz once more becomes a problem. AI is rewriting business models while everyone pretends to remain calm. And the person at the head of the table feels they have only two choices: defend what exists, or risk blowing it up.

These moments are no longer rare. They are 2026’s signature style, where markets lurch, supply chains creak, and stability feels like wishful thinking. Brent crude has been flirting with the triple-digit level this week. The Sensex keeps testing recent lows. Currencies across emerging markets, including India, remain under pressure. Europe’s growth forecast is stuck around 1.2%. Yet we still judge leaders as though calm waters were the default.

So leaders find themselves caught in a binary trap. Defensive preservation or offensive growth? Short-term survival or long-term reinvention? Maintain personal equilibrium or carry the collective burden? Beneath all of it lies the same question: comfort and stability today, or stress and sacrifice for something that may matter later?

This dilemma is not new. The Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard framed it two centuries ago in Either/Or: we choose immediate pleasure, or commitment and responsibility, even at a cost. Kierkegaard himself paid that price. He broke off his engagement with the love of his life, convinced domestic happiness would dull the edge he needed for his work. A brutal decision, but he made it.

Fortunately, we do not have to be quite so dramatic. Contemporary psychology has quietly introduced a third path. The psychologist Shigehiro Oishi calls it the psychologically rich life. Not the happy life of ease, nor the meaningful life defined purely by sacrifice, but a life filled with variety, novelty and perspective-shifting experiences, even when those experiences are uncomfortable, chaotic or exhausting.

It is the difference between a smooth road and a road with bends, detours and the occasional spectacular view.

A Third Path
This idea also softens an older philosophical debate. Aristotle believed suffering could be transcended through flourishing. Nietzsche insisted suffering should be embraced: what does not kill you makes you stronger. Oishi offers a subtler answer: collect the experiences — the shocks, reversals and surprises — and let them form the narrative you carry.

But why should leaders facing high-stakes uncertainty care about philosophical debates or psychological frameworks?

Because once we view life through the lens of psychological richness, volatility stops looking like a pure threat and begins to resemble raw material.

That shift in perspective is urgently needed. PwC’s latest CEO survey shows only 30% of chief executives feel confident about near-term growth. That’s the lowest level in five years. Volatility, cyber risk and geopolitics top the list of concerns. In such an environment, the old comfort strategy becomes dangerous.

Executives navigating currency swings, energy shocks and AI disruption often report lower day-to-day happiness than earlier generations of leaders. Yet many also describe sharper instincts, wider vision and a deeper sense of what they are building.

The psychiatrist Viktor Frankl, who survived Nazi concentration camps, expressed this powerfully. Human beings, he argued, are not wired primarily for pleasure but for meaning. The one freedom we always retain is the freedom to choose our attitude towards circumstances. Psychological richness is simply a practical way of exercising that freedom without pretending the stress is not real.

Return, then, to the boardroom where we began. The decision is no longer a stark choice between present comfort and future purpose. The better question becomes: how can this moment of turbulence shape the next chapter of the story?

The forces that make leadership exhausting are often the same forces that make it transformative.

Yet boards and investors still discuss executive well-being in outdated terms like balance, stress reduction, happiness metrics. They may be missing the point. Leaders who leave the deepest mark are rarely the happiest in any given month. They are the ones whose lives become psychologically rich: messy, demanding, full of plot twists, yet strangely coherent in retrospect.

Whom are we kidding? The world is unlikely to become simpler. Geopolitics, technological disruption and climate pressures are accelerating. In such a landscape, success increasingly looks less like serenity and more like the ability to move through complexity with curiosity intact.

The real question in 2026 is no longer happiness versus meaning. It is whether leaders can step beyond that tired binary and treat volatility as raw material rather than pure threat. Do that, and you may discover reserves of creativity and resilience you did not know you possessed.

Because in the end, leadership is not measured by the serenity of your days, but by the purpose and the stories you leave behind.