281. A Further Need

You think you’ll be happy when you have everything you want. You make plans and goals and you put your efforts towards their fulfillment. You avoid anything that might impede your success or limit your achievements. You believe that your actions are the right ones and that you will build the best possible life for yourself by reaching your goals.

With time and effort, you start to get a taste of success. The flavour is sweet but it fades quickly. You’re always left with the impression that something is still missing. You think this is just because you haven’t achieved everything yet, so you continue forward in your quest towards bigger and bigger goals.

Finally, after enormous effort and struggle, you’ve got it all. There’s nothing else that you want, no further goal to strive towards. This is it — the top of the mountain. You feel happy when you look back on all you’ve accomplished to get here. But when you try to sit with the present moment or look towards the future, there is a distinct feeling of dread that you cannot seem to shake. Something is wrong and you don’t know what it is.

You have everything you want and you should be happy. But there are still months and years stretching out before you, and you can’t see any purpose to this time beyond trivialities like travelling the world and seeking hedonistic exploits. You realize now that your accomplishments are not as meaningful as they once seemed and your years of climbing almost feel like a waste. You sometimes even think you did it all for nothing, but you bury that thought as deep as you can because you cannot bring yourself to accept it.

You wonder if this is all there really is to life. If it always ends with this feeling of nothingness. If the void ultimately consumes us all. You’re wildly successful by every available metric and still you feel no joy. Sometimes you force yourself to sit with this terrible conclusion until you start to squirm in discomfort. It’s only then that you have the strange sense that there is an intense but vague need inside you that still has not been met.

What is this need? Where does it come from? What does it require? These are the questions you must now find the courage to confront.