I’d argue it’s more an attribute of being a driven, difficult to satisfy, competitive, human.

Which correlates strongly with ‘success’ in any system where there is a clear metric for success, which is certainly true for our current economic system eh? If there was a system they wanted to compete in where the metric was ‘happiness’ measured by some concrete metric, I bet those same people would be as aggressively ‘happy’ with however it was measured too - and just as actually miserable.

That those people are rarely (if ever) happy is a side effect of those attributes, and a core part of what makes them the way they are.

After all, if they were able to be happy with anything less…. They’d have stopped already? And hence have less/a lower ‘score’ on that particular metric? And probably actually be happier.

Notably, I know plenty of people who are very happy with nothing - dirt poor - and plenty of people who are also miserable with nothing too.

The difference is, it’s a lot less competitive being dirt poor eh?