Will I Ever Fulfill All My Desires?

All of us have this question that bugs us. What is the answer?

We often wonder if we will ever be able to fulfill all our desires. Sometimes it scares us that we will grow old and die without achieving something significant. What is significant is something that we have to decide for ourselves, but most of the time that “significance” is defined by what other people have achieved.

I wouldn’t call myself a highly achieved person according to society’s standards. However, I have achieved a bunch of desires for myself. Life has given me an opportunity to closely observe what happens to me when I achieve them. I am sharing that experience with you.

One of the reasons why we feel hollow once we achieve something is not because what we have achieved is not valuable. But because what kept us alive was the pursuit of achieving something and not the end result. Since we lose the drive to achieve something once we have achieved something, we desire the drive to achieve something.

I have experimented with multiple strategies in my life to deal with this conundrum. One strategy that has become part of my life is to have an impossibly high goal that it is very unlikely that I will achieve in this lifetime. And if I do, my mind tells me that it is worth it. We will figure out what to chase after we achieve that.

We set a very high goal, something that we are not so likely to achieve in this lifetime. When I say “not so likely”, it means the percentage chance of us staying focused until we achieve that goal is less. However, if we stay focused, we are likely to achieve it. But once achieved, we are not gonna be satisfied.

So people say, success is not a goal. It’s a journey. Everything that we achieve is a milestone on the road to success.

The second model is to achieve multiple things on the way and celebrate it. This puts more focus on the journey than the end goal.

But the problem is that we will keep achieving goals until we die. If we die, there is no happiness in that. We just stop to exist.

In the pursuit of achieving something for happiness, we pay with happiness and lose it. We grind, we hustle, towards a goal. We get old and time slips by. The only thing that is scarce in this world is not Bitcoin. It’s time.

Time is an illusion of the mind. We set goals for the future and we regret that in the past we did not achieve enough. The time is a creation of the ego. Ego is the perception of “I am”.

We have to sacrifice to achieve our goals and there is pain in that. Nothing is free in this world. We have to give something up to get something. So we give up fun (happiness) to achieve goals (possible future happiness).

If you just look at the other side of the coin, we keep sacrificing until we die. Some of us think that we can leave a legacy that would give us a peaceful death, but if peaceful death is the ultimate goal, it can be achieved with technology such as assisted suicide (trigger warning).

There is no point in sacrificing a lot, to achieve a lot just so that we can die well. A lot of people have achieved a lot but had a bad death. Like the founder of a multi-million dollar company who ran because some dogs chased him, fell, hit his head, and passed away. A lot of successful people die meaningless deaths.

What’s the point of achieving something that can be taken away by death?

Past achievements and the memories of it. Future dreams and the expectation of it. Past regrets and the pain of it. Future failures and the pessimism of it. All of this is only created in our minds and is not real. It feels real because we have worked for years to develop an identity (ego).

At this very moment, there is no past or the future. Technically, memories good and bad, imagination about the future, good and bad, cannot exist at this moment. Happiness and sadness also come only in the future or the past. At this very moment, you are neither happy nor sad.

So the only way to optimize this life is to expand on that moment.

When you expand on the moment, there is no past or future. There is no happiness or sadness. This is the ultimate model for living life. Everything lies outside the circle. Once you step outside, you start putting things into buckets. Once you are inside the circle, at this moment, everything else fades away.

When you get to this moment, memories and dreams will be there but it won’t be yours. It will be the creation of the mind and you will just witness it. There will be sadness and happiness, but you will just observe and experience it.

Any kind of happiness, once you try to capture it, will convert into sadness because happiness is transitory. The truth of all life experiences can only be observed from the present moment.

What you have read in this article is my theoretical representation of an optimized life. The only way to realize this in practice is to meditate.

This life is an opportunity and the opportunity is only this moment. Even if someone is so powerful that he is the ruler of the world, he has no control over the certainty of the next moment. He could die moments later and he has no control over it.

If you want to thank the sender of the gift, the best way to thank is to receive the gift with an open heart and make the best use of it. The best way to make use of this life is to be present to the fullness of life, all the time.

Be. Here. Now. All the time.

All goals are meaningless. There is no point in being “Alexander the Great” because it’s not a being. And if there are no beings, he doesn’t exist or has ever existed. No one wants to be “dead” Alexandar the Great. People would choose to be an “Alive” beggar rather than a dead great man. The ultimate goal is not to have goals. To live in the moment, all the time.

If you are comparing yourself to others, why don’t you compare yourself to the billions of dead, but successful people? You are already ahead of them. You are alive. That’s quite an achievement if you want to look at it that way.

Ironically, if you start living life in this moment, all the time… money, and fame will come to you even if you want to hide in the Himalayas.