by Serguey Shinder
I spent a long stretch of my life certain that a particular achievement would change how I felt. When I reached it, I would arrive. The low hum of not-yet-enough would finally quiet, and I would stand in a new and permanent contentment. I organized years around that belief. And then I reached the thing, the actual thing I had wanted, and the strangest part was how briefly it mattered.
The satisfaction was real, I want to be fair to it. There was a genuine glow, a day or two of it, maybe a week. But then the glow faded the way glows do, and the low hum came back, only now it was pointing at a new target, a little further out, and I noticed with something close to alarm that the target had moved the instant I touched the old one. The finish line was not a place. It was a horizon, and horizons recede exactly as fast as you walk toward them.
For a while this felt like a cruel trick, as though I had been promised an arrival that did not exist. I had spent so much of myself getting there, and the there had evaporated on contact. If reaching the goal did not deliver the feeling I had chased, then what had all the striving been for? It is a genuinely disorienting thing to get what you wanted and find the wanting still intact, still hungry, simply repointed.
What I slowly came to understand is that I had loaded the achievement with a job it was never able to do. I had asked a milestone to fix a feeling, and milestones cannot fix feelings. They can mark progress, they can open doors, they can be genuinely good. What they cannot do is quiet the part of you that generates the sense of not-enough, because that part does not respond to accomplishments. It responds, if it responds to anything, to attention paid to it directly.
So I stopped treating the next finish line as a cure. I still set goals, I still cross them, and crossing them is still satisfying in its small honest way. But I no longer wait at the far side of an achievement for a transformation that is not coming. The contentment I was trying to buy with accomplishment turned out to be available, in modest quantities, in the ordinary middle of the work itself, in the days that were not finish lines at all.
The horizon still recedes. That has not changed, and I no longer expect it to. What changed is that I stopped staking my sense of enough on ever reaching it, because the reaching was always going to leave me exactly where I stood, wanting the next thing. The peace I was chasing at the finish line was never stored at the finish line. It was, embarrassingly, back where I started, in the part of me I had been trying to accomplish my way out of.
– Serguey Asael Shinder
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