This paper reckons with contemporary depictions of unhappiness in twenty-first-century diasporic Asian cultural production to theorize unhappiness as a decolonial politic for challenging the colonial ideologies structuring the American Dream under capitalism. It reads Lee Sung Jin’s hit Netflix series Beef alongside a growing corpus of literary and cultural works that portray diasporic Asians as unhappy despite appearing to obtain all the hallmarks of success that would otherwise lend to happiness and signify their access to the good life. This essay identifies an emergent form of unhappiness that results not from the failure to obtain success—a thematic trope of the immigrant narrative—but rather from having achieved it. This critical distinction reveals a crucial shift in perspective for conceiving contemporary diasporic Asianness, which is usually narrativized by representational portrayals organized around the capacity to access happiness and the good life, as expressed in Crazy Rich Asians and Always Be My Maybe. To situate this argument, I trace the development of happiness as a neoliberal cultural ideology from the late twentieth century amid the global restructuring of labor to the early 2000s alongside the rise of the positive psychology movement. Diasporic Asians are uniquely positioned to confront the false promises of the good life in the U.S. because, as purported model minorities, their relationship to individual success and happiness have historically served to legitimize the post-welfare state since the 1980s. My reading of Beef not only expands the representational range of diasporic Asian affect, but also imagines the political import of unhappiness as a decolonial mechanism for enabling new modes of coalition and belonging.