When you reach the goal, you feel empty. But we keep setting goals.
There’s a session that has become almost religious. You sit down with someone — a coach, a mentor, an enlightened friend — and you run the ritual: where are you, what’s going well, what’s blocking you, what do you want to achieve, what’s the plan.
And people do this with an air of virtue. As if it were maturity. As if it were health.
It’s not. It’s anxiety with an action plan.
What you’re doing there is declaring war on the present in the name of a fantasy. And then you call it ambition.
Your anguish rarely comes from who you are. It comes from the confrontation between who you are and who you think you should be. It’s a brutal internal conflict — you against yourself — in service of something you imagined. And when you turn that into goals and deadlines, you make that conflict official. You sign a contract with a future you don’t even control.
Health is the perfect example. Being healthy is not a destination. It’s a practice. And when you start treating it as a goal — lose eight kilos, run a marathon, get perfect blood work — you create backlog. And backlog is fight. It’s constant pressure. It’s your nervous system in permanent threat mode.
And then there’s the part nobody wants to admit.
When someone reaches the goal, they feel an enormous emptiness. And the sentence that follows is always the same: this wasn’t it after all.
This should destroy the entire narrative. If the goal was salvation, why does salvation taste like emptiness?
Because the goal was rarely the goal. It was an attempt to silence something that was there before the plan. And the plan doesn’t touch that. The plan only delays it.
The question is not whether you define direction in your life or not. The question is where that comes from. From fear or from truth. From escape or from contact.
Because there’s an enormous difference between walking with intention and running away from yourself.
And no spreadsheet can tell the two apart.