Success Is Not What I Thought It Was

For most of my twenties I had a fairly clear picture of what success would feel like once I arrived at it. I have now arrived at several of the specific markers I once used to define it. The feeling did not match the picture.

I want to be precise about what I mean, because this kind of statement can sound like false modesty, and it isn't that. The achievements were real. The numbers were real. I am not describing some hollow facade that collapsed on closer inspection. I am describing something stranger: the achievements were exactly as real as I expected, and the satisfaction was much smaller than I expected, and I spent a long time confused about the gap between those two facts.

My early picture of success had an implicit promise built into it, one I never examined closely enough to notice I was relying on: that enough achievement would eventually produce a settled feeling, a sense of having arrived somewhere stable, where the striving could finally stop. What I found instead was that each achievement simply relocated the goalpost slightly further out, and the striving did not stop, it just changed its target.

I do not think this is a unique discovery. I think it is one of the more common realizations successful people eventually have, late enough that they've already spent years organizing their life around the original, mistaken picture. What strikes me now, looking back, is that I never actually chose that picture. I inherited the expectation that achievement would answer the question of whether my life mattered, the way you inherit a native language — so early and so completely that you never notice it was a choice someone else made for you.

I am not sure I have fully replaced it with anything better. I have simply started noticing, more often than I used to, the moments when I am still running the old calculation without meaning to — still half-expecting the next milestone to deliver the settled feeling the last one didn't. I don't think the inheritance disappears just because you've identified it. I think you just get a little faster at recognizing it for what it is, each time it shows up uninvited.

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