The Truth About Connection: Why Success Feels Empty Without It | (#060) Beyond Success: Psychology & Philosophy for Achievers, with David Tian, Ph.D.

Most people hear the word connection and think Wi-Fi or handshake that lands them a deal, or maybe a warm body next to them at night, but when they’re lying awake at 2:00 a.m., staring at the ceiling, what they’re craving isn’t a stronger signal or more LinkedIn contacts. It’s something deeper, something that doesn’t drop when life gets hard, the kind that makes you feel seen even when you’re silent.

The irony is, the more driven and successful people become, the less of that they tend to feel, because they’ve been trained to chase performance, not presence. They’ve learned how to win attention, but not how to receive understanding, so they can walk into a room full of people who admire them and still feel utterly lonely. [00:55.5]

The truth is, most ambitious people have no idea what true connection even feels like. They think they’re independent, when, really, they’re isolated. They think their self-sufficiency is strength, when, in reality, it’s armor, and that armor works, but only in the short term. Without connection, success becomes hollow. Sex becomes performance. Status becomes a mask for emptiness. You can achieve everything you thought you wanted and still feel that quiet ache inside, the one that whispers, “There has to be more to life than this”—and there is. Its connection, not as a buzzword, not as a networking skill, but as the fundamental human experience that every nervous system has been wired to crave since birth.

In this episode, we’re going to unpack what connection really means, emotionally, psychologically and philosophically, why you’ve been unconsciously seeking it all your life, and how you can actually practice it like any other skill until it becomes part of who you are.

I’m David Tian, a certified IFS therapy practitioner and a Brown University–certified leadership and performance coach. For almost the past two decades, I’ve been helping hundreds of thousands of people from over 87 countries find fulfillment, meaning and success in their personal and professional lives. [02:05.0]

Let’s return to connection. Let’s first look at what connection is not. Connection is not networking. It isn’t that quick exchange of business cards at a conference or the friendly nod you give at the gym. It’s not attachment either, that anxious grasping that mistakes dependence for closeness. It’s not shared hobbies or liking the same football team. You can debate tactics every weekend and still never know each other’s inner lives, and it’s definitely not just physical intimacy. You can sleep next to someone for years and still feel utterly lonely. You can have 10,000 followers and not one person who really knows you. You can have a whole group chat that replies instantly, but no one who can hold the space with you.

So, what is that emptiness pointing to? Why does it feel like something’s missing even when life looks full? Because connection isn’t measured in contact. It’s measured in presence. It’s not the number of people around you. It’s the depth of awareness between you. [03:02.6]

In moral philosophy, connection has always been the antidote to isolation. It’s what rescues us from the trap of treating others as tools or roles or means to an end. Kant understood this when he said each person must be treated as an end in themselves. Mengzi or Mencius said it another way, “The heart that cannot bear another suffering is the beginning of humanity.”

Every tradition, East or West, has known this truth. To live well is to live in right relationship with others and with yourself. That’s what connection really is. It’s not a transaction. It’s not a strategy. It’s the moral and emotional recognition that another person’s experience matters just as much as your own, and without that recognition, no success ever feels complete. [03:48.8]

Connection is the felt experience of being seen, understood and accepted by another person, and most of all, by yourself, not in theory, not as a concept, but is a moment that lands in your heart, your gut, your spine. It’s when your guard drops for a second and someone meets you there and you don’t feel the need to perform. It’s when you realize you don’t have to be impressive or smart or funny to be worthy of being here. It’s security without control, presence without an agenda.

For one client I worked with, let’s call him Daniel, this truth took years to find. He was the kind of guy who crushed every goal he set. He built a company, bought a mansion, dated beautiful women. On paper, it looked like he had won, but when the lights went off at night, his mind would spiral. He’d tell me, “I feel like no one really knows me, and honestly, I don’t even know what it would feel like for someone to know me truly.”

In our sessions, we started to notice how every time someone got close, emotionally close, he’d pull back. He’d crack a joke or change the subject, or just go cold, not because he didn’t want closeness, but because closeness terrified him. Somewhere along the way, his brain had learned that needing others meant weakness, so he built walls, beautifully designed, high-functioning, socially approved walls, but behind them he was starving. [05:08.3]

So, one day, after months of peeling back those layers, he said something startling. He said, “For the first time, I think I’ve actually let someone see me, and it wasn’t in therapy. It was with a friend. He told me something painful, and instead of giving advice or trying to fix him, I just sat there with him, holding the space, as you call it, and somehow that moment helped to heal something in me, too.” That’s connection. It’s not a transaction. It’s not a performance. It’s the emotional and mental recognition that we’re part of the same humanity, the same fragile, beautiful, complicated species, and that our stories overlap more than we realized before. [05:50.7]

In every culture, the moral life begins where empathy becomes real, when it’s not just an idea but a way of being. Connection is moral as much as it is emotional. It’s what reminds us that success without relationship is just an elegant form of loneliness, and it’s what lets us return again and again to the truth that no matter how independent we think we are, we only become fully human through relationship with one another. 

So, how did we as a species lose sight of the primacy or the importance of connection? Why do we chase success, status, wealth, recognition? It’s easy to tell ourselves, it’s about freedom or achievement or impact, but when you peel back the layers, what we really want is simpler. We want to be accepted. We want to be seen. We want to be loved.

When someone finally recognizes your hard work, it’s not the award that moves you. It’s the feeling that you matter. When someone looks at you with admiration or desire, it’s not the attention you crave. It’s the sense that you are enough. Even power, when you trace it back far enough, is usually a shield against the fear of being small or forgotten. [07:01.8]

The tragedy is that we chase symbols of connection instead of connection itself, money, fame, status. They’re all proxies. They promise belonging, but they deliver performance. They promise warmth, but give us mere applause instead, and applause fades fast. As children, we learned early that love could be or feel conditional. Smile for the camera and you get praised. Get good grades and you earn approval and attention. Behave well and you’re loved. At least, it feels like that for a while. So, we adapted. We turned connection into a performance. We learned to trade authenticity for acceptance, but connection, true connection doesn’t work that way. It can’t be earned. It can only be given and received in honesty.

From a psychological point of view, this isn’t just sentimental talk. It’s survival. As infants, connection was survival. We were completely beholden to bigger human beings to feed us, clothe us, keep us safe and shelter us. Our nervous systems are wired to seek safety in relationship. If our caregivers were calm, we felt safe, and the research proves this. If our caregivers were distant or angry, we felt fear, and again, the research proves us out. [08:20.0]

That pattern doesn’t disappear when we grow up. Our biology doesn’t outgrow its dependence. It just gets better at pretending. We build careers, we move cities or countries, we collect followers, all while claiming independence, but deep down, our nervous systems are still searching for someone safe enough to rest with, still asking the same ancient question, “Am I loved? Am I enough to be worthy of love?” When we don’t get that love directly, we go looking for substitutes. We call it success. We call it achievement. But under it all is the same hope that finally someone will see us and say, “You are enough.” [09:01.8]

We think we’re chasing freedom, but most of us are just avoiding rejection, because the truth is, most of our striving isn’t about being free. It’s about being safe from shame. But safety and freedom are not opposites. True freedom is being at peace in connection, not being untouched by others, but being unafraid to be known by them and possibly being rejected.

C. S. Lewis put it beautifully when he said, “To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even a pet. Wrap it carefully around with hobbies and little luxuries, and avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your self-centeredness, but in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, your heart will change. It will not be broken. Instead, it will become unbreakable, but also impenetrable and irredeemable. To love it all is to be open.” [10:05.3]

So, connection isn’t a distraction from success. It’s what success was always trying to point you toward, because once you’ve built the life you thought you wanted and you still feel empty, the only thing left to build is relationship, present, authentic, alive connection.

So, the question isn’t whether you’re successful enough. The question is, who knows the real you? Who do you let see behind the masks? If the answer is no one, then maybe it’s time to redefine what winning really means, because fulfillment isn’t found in mere freedom. It’s found in love, and the good life, the truly good life, isn’t about winning. It’s about love and connection.

Most men are emotionally malnourished. They don’t even know it, because they’ve been starving for so long that emptiness feels normal. From a young age, they were told the rules: “Don’t cry. Don’t need. Don’t depend. Be strong. Be tough. Be in control. Don’t show weakness.” So, we built strength the only way we knew how, by shutting down our sensitivity. [11:13.4]

We turned off the part of ourselves that could feel shame. But when you turn off shame, you also turn off excitement. If you shut down sadness, you also dull joy. If you suppress need, you also block intimacy because you can’t selectively numb emotions. You just end up numbing everything. Now, decades later, these men wonder why they can’t feel close to anyone, even when they want to, why relationships feel like work, why love feels unsafe, why when someone gets too close, something inside them quietly panics. [11:50.2]

Sometimes success comes with a hidden cost. You might have built a career, a business, or life you thought you wanted, but inside, maybe you feel burned out or unfulfilled. Or maybe it shows up in your relationships with your partner, your family or your team, where no matter how hard you try, the same painful patterns keep repeating.

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Here’s the pattern I see all the time in my work. Emotional suppression leads to numbness. Numbness turns into loneliness, and loneliness drives addictive compensation. Some chase success. Some chase sexual conquest. Some settle for porn. Some bury themselves in work, others in the gym. But underneath it all, it’s all the same engine—a desperate search for something that feels like connection without the vulnerability of actually connecting. [13:16.7]

They confuse power with connection, control with safety. They think, If I can master everything around me, maybe I’ll finally feel safe inside, but psychological security does not come from the outside. It comes from inside. It requires trust in your True Self.

One of my clients, let’s call him Chris, was a classic example of this, top executive in his 40s, sharp mind, very dominant demeanor, but his marriage was falling apart. He would tell me, “I provide everything. I do everything right. Why does she still say she feels alone?” We started exploring what doing everything right meant for him. He realized it meant fixing, solving, managing problems, but never revealing himself. [14:01.4]

He was terrified of letting her see him sad or scared, or uncertain. In his world, those emotions, as he grew up, meant weakness. So, over time, in our work together, he learned something revolutionary to him, that vulnerability is not the opposite of strength. Instead, it takes true strength to hold vulnerability. Only when he stopped trying to be perfect or look perfect was when his wife finally said to him, “I finally feel like I’m really close to you again.”

Connection isn’t natural when you’ve spent your whole life armored up, but it is learnable. You trained your body to perform. You trained your mind to excel. Now you can train your heart to be strong enough to stay open when it matters most, because emotional strength isn’t built by suppressing what you feel. It’s built by facing it with curiosity instead of shame, and once a man learns that his relationships, his leadership, his whole sense of self changes, not because he has added something new, but because for the first time perhaps, he has stopped cutting off the aspects of himself that are capable of authentic connection. [15:07.8]

Connection is not luck. It’s not chemistry. It’s not fate or something the universe randomly blesses you with. Connection is a skill or set of skills, and like every skill, it can be trained, refined and mastered. The truth is, connection is the result of practice, daily, deliberate, sometimes uncomfortable practice. It’s not built by swiping or small talk, or collecting followers. It’s built through presence, through showing up, through staying open when your instinct is to shut down.

There are four pillars I teach for authentic connection. I call them the SOAR pillars, S-O-A-R, because when you practice them, your relationships, your leadership, your emotional life, they start to take off. Okay, so the first is “self-groundedness.” It’s about being rooted in your body instead of getting lost in your thoughts, because you can’t connect when you’re spinning around in your head, lost in your head, stuck in your head. [16:00.8]

Grounding means slowing your breath, deepening your breath, feeling your feet, noticing your emotions instead of trying to avoid them. It’s what allows you to show up fully instead of reacting from old patterns, so it starts with that self-groundedness.

The second is “openness,” dropping the masks, the shields, releasing the need to perform. Instead of scanning for what to say next, you get curious about what’s actually happening, for you and for the other person, in your thoughts and emotions. When you stop trying to impress others, people finally start to feel the real you.

The third pillar is “attunement.” This is the art of letting another person’s truth exist without needing to fix or debate or rescue it. It’s empathy in action. Most people listen to reply. Attunement listens to understand. When someone senses you’re with them, not judging, not solving, just witnessing, they relax, and that relaxation is required for connection. [17:04.6]

Finally, “resonance.” This is where you share what’s real for you without managing the outcome, not a performance, not a strategy, just honesty. It’s knowing, Here’s what’s alive in me right now, and then sharing that and trusting that truth has intrinsic value of its own. It’s how connection becomes mutual instead of one-sided.

These four pillars are like muscles. You don’t build them overnight. You build them through repetition, feedback and recovery. You mess up, you repair, you learn, and each time you do, your muscles grow stronger. Philosophically, connection is the practice of moral imagination, the ability to place yourself in another’s experience, to see through their eyes without losing yourself in the process.

In a world that rewards outrage and polarization, this might be the highest form of courage, because when you choose connection over ego, connection over certainty, connection over control, you’re doing something that nowadays feels radical. You’re choosing authentic connection. [18:11.8]

Now, you can’t connect deeply with others if you’re cut off from yourself, so that’s really the first prerequisite, connection with yourself. Most people try to build closeness by reaching outward, by trying to find the right partner or find the right friends, or find the right community, and then, finally, they’ll feel enough and they’ll feel that connection they’ve been unconsciously craving. But if you’re disconnected on the inside, every relationship outside eventually hits the same invisible wall, because connection starts inward. It begins with how you relate to you, yourself.

Self-connection means turning towards your emotions instead of running from them. It means listening to the parts of you that you’ve exiled, the anger, the shame, the sadness, and saying to them, “You belong here, too.” It’s the courage to stop fighting yourself. [19:05.6]

For most of us, this will feel unnatural. We’ve been trained to silence anything that looks weak or messy. We’re told to power through, to toughen up, to stay positive, to move on. But the emotions we push away don’t actually disappear. They just go underground and get repressed, and from there, they quietly steer and sabotage our lives, our choices, our relationships, our reactions.

In therapy, I often use a model I call IFS therapy, Internal Family Systems. It’s based on a simple truth—every one of us is made up of parts. There might be the achiever part, the inner critic, these different protectors, different inner child parts, and they all carry good intentions, even when their strategies turn out to not work so well and lead to pain. At the center of it all is the True Self or the Higher Self, calm, curious, compassionate, confident, creative, connected. [20:02.0]

The goal isn’t to silence the parts. It’s to connect with them first, and when you start doing that, when you sit with your sadness instead of trying to reject it, or you thank your anger for trying to protect you, something important shifts. You stop being at war with yourself, and that inner peace naturally flows outward.

Connection on the outside mirrors your connection on your inside. If you’re fragmented, split within, your relationships will reflect that fragmentation. But when you’re integrated, when all your parts trust your self-leadership, others can finally trust you, too. It’s the paradox of connection. The more you learn to be with yourself, the more others feel safe being with you, because they can sense it, your steadiness, your authenticity, your openness, your courage. They’re not meeting your masks anymore. They’re meeting the real you. The outer mirrors the inner. [21:01.0]

When you reconnect with yourself, others can finally connect to the real you, too, and that is when love, true friendship, real belonging stop being things you have to chase, and they start being the natural overflowing of who you have become. When you master connection with yourself and with others. Life stops feeling like a grind and starts to flow. You no longer have to push so hard to make things happen, because what you do springs from alignment, not anxiety. Love feels secure. Work feels meaningful. Even success shifts shape. It’s no longer proof of worth. It’s an expression of it.

That’s the paradox of connection. When you stop chasing validation and start living from relationship, inner and outer, you get everything you were chasing before, but without the desperation. Peace replaces pressure. Presence replaces performance. [22:00.8]

There’s something larger at stake here. Connection isn’t just a private pleasure. It’s a public virtue. It’s what makes compassion possible. It’s what allows trust to grow between people who disagree. It’s the invisible glue that holds civilization together. Without it, we reduce each other to competitors or consumers, but with it, we remember what it means to be truly human.

So, connection isn’t a trait. It’s a practice. It’s not something you’re born with or without. It’s something you build, moment by moment, choice by choice, and if you’re ready to start learning it not as a mere idea, but as an embodied skill, then this is exactly what we’ve been practicing together in my current programs, because connection can’t be mastered by reading about it. It has to be felt, in your body, in your conversations, in the way you show up when it’s uncomfortable. [22:52.3]

Every time you breathe through tension instead of shutting down, every time you stay curious instead of defensive, every time you let yourself be authentic instead of perfect, you’re building that muscle. You’re rewiring your nervous system and your brain to trust openness instead of armor—and when that happens, your experience of life completely changes. You start leading differently, start loving differently. Even being alone feels different, less like isolation, more like rest.

That’s what my programs are about, not just dating better, leading better or living better, but finally coming home to yourself and letting others meet you there, because once you do, connection stops being something you chase. It becomes the atmosphere you live in.In the end, connection isn’t something you get, it’s something you allow. It’s what remains when the walls come down, when the striving stops, and you let yourself be seen, and once you’ve felt that true connection, unforced, alive, nothing else will actually ever compare, because it’s not just another achievement. It’s the return to what you are always meant to be. [24:03.2]