What if you already won?

When a person can’t find a deep sense of meaning, they distract themselves with pleasure.
Viktor E. Frankl

Many of us, after a long hard day of work, seek to “unwind” by doing mind-numbing things: watching videos online, playing games, or endlessly scrolling social media. Our jobs and our work do not provide us with a deep sense of meaning, and so we crave distraction at the end of it.

Contrast this with most doctors or small business owners. Their jobs seem soul-sucking on the outside, but somehow they still manage and even thrive in it. They can work long nights or weekends, but still seem happy. The difference is that these people find meaning in their jobs.

In a podcast episode of Modern Wisdom (by Chris Williamson) with Simon Sinek, a best-selling author, they reversed this quote by Viktor Frankl.

When a man can’t find a deep sense of pleasure, they distract themselves with meaning.

For people who do this, we call them suffering from success. They have worked hard and long for many years, but happiness and contentment is always elusive. Their drive to work and succeed also prevents them from enjoying the fruits of their labor. Holidays, day offs, and timeouts feel like wasted time. Hours spent not working are lost opportunities that could have made them more money, more fame, more stuff.

This doesn’t apply only to celebrities or CEOs of large companies. This also happens to regular people like you and me.

For a long time we have been ingrained with the idea that saving is a virtue. Save first before you invest, pay yourself first before paying others, and so on. While these are correct and actions that we must do, sometimes we take it to the extreme. Our tendency to save money becomes the reward in and of itself instead of just a path towards some goal.

We raise the banner of delayed gratification, believing it is the noble thing to do. Our hard work and suffering in the present can be tolerated as we can see our salvation in the future.

The meaning treadmill

If you have your nose to the grindstone too much every day, you run the risk of waking up one morning and realizing that you may have delayed too much. And, at the extreme, indefinitely delayed gratification means no gratification.
Bill Perkins, Die with Zero

As we continue working hard and being frugal, our ability to derive pleasure from the present diminishes. But instead of correcting our path, we dig ourselves deeper by believing that what we do has more meaning than it should.

No one imagines that a symphony is supposed to improve as it goes along, or that the whole object of playing is to reach the finale. The point of music is discovered in every moment of playing and listening to it. It is the same, I feel, with the greater part of our lives, and if we are unduly absorbed in improving them we may forget altogether to live them.
Alan Watts

Years of reading financial independence blogs, books, podcast, you name it, made money the goal. Only when I got older I realized that this is actually a mirage. I have been aiming for a goal that has no end. Money, being just numbers in someone’s ledger, is infinite. Couple that with our good-old human ability of hedonic adaptation and it is easy to find yourself stuck in the rat race.

Alex Hormozi has this wonderful quote: “You’ve already achieved goals you said would make you happy“. The dreams you had when you were much younger are now (or close) to the reality you are living now. What is the point of struggling further? Why aim for another arbitrary goal if it won’t fulfill you, like all the other arbitrary goals you set in the past?