When I was seventeen years old and clueless about what I wanted to do with my life, I attended a job fair, where I stumbled upon a stand advertising a study course in industrial engineering. “So,” I asked the lady behind the counter, “what do you do as an industrial engineer?”
“You’ll develop a unique blend of engineering and business skills,” she said.
“That’s pretty cool,” I said.
“Because of that, you’ll be highly qualified to take on a management position. You’ll also attend business dinners and visit global industry partners to ensure international cooperation.”
That’s what they told me. But what I heard was this: “If you go down this path, you’ll be rich, successful, and respected.”
I went home that day, put together my CV, and started drafting application letters. After an arduous application process, I was accepted. Three years later, I graduated. Today, another five years later, I no longer work in the field of engineering. I certainly don’t feel rich, successful, and respected (not that I ever did).
But on most days, I do feel content about how my life turned out.
What happened was that I stepped into what I’ll call the accomplishment trap. It’s the idea that reaching certain goals is never as fulfilling as it seems while working toward them. When I applied for the study course, I thought my life would be complete once I got accepted. When I started the study course, I thought my life would be complete once I graduated. When I graduated, I thought my life would be complete once I began my job as an engineer.
Needless to say, my life was never complete because it’s in the nature of the accomplishment trap that the promise of satisfaction remains in the distant future. The goalposts always shift. It’s like paying off some kind of enormous debt and hoping that once we settle the score, we’ll magically be free and happy. Except, once we’ve paid off the debt, we begin to take on new debts, as if living in debt is the only feasible way of living.
Of course, it’s nice to reach an accomplishment. I felt satisfied when I got into my study course, when I graduated, and so on. However, my fleeting fulfillment didn’t justify the anticipation and effort I invested to attain it. This realization — that although striving toward an accomplishment generates meaning and motivation, achieving the accomplishment erases the very meaning and motivation that were necessary to achieve it —triggered my first existential crisis.
One night, I was watching the TV series BoJack Horseman, when the character Diane said something that summed up my feelings perfectly:
Well, that’s the problem about life: either you know what you want and you don’t get what you want, or you get what you want and then you don’t know what you want.
I suppose this is the logic behind all existential crises, including the ominous midlife crisis. A person spends their whole life working toward a promotion, saving up for a big vacation, getting in shape, or whatever. When they finally get that thing, it’s like, “Okay, this is nice. But is this really it? Is this all there is to life?” So they think, “Ah, I know why I feel this way. I just haven’t put in enough work, or I haven’t bought enough stuff.” And so, they buy a motorcycle, they become the last to leave the office, they start running marathons, they ruin their marriage, they get angry at strangers.
I’m exaggerating. But it’s fair to say that I glimpsed into this kind of crisis. I may not have bought a motorcycle, but I quit engineering, traveled to Portugal, and tried to become a writer. All the while, I spent months ruminating about the meaning of it all, my purpose, what the hell I was doing on this planet.
The great thing about existential crises — be it quarter-life, third-life, or mid-life — is that they suss out the illusory promises of big accomplishments. They expose the accomplishment trap. All of a sudden, it becomes radically clear that these lofty goals can’t be solely responsible for generating lasting satisfaction.
Okay, then. So we lower our expectations about accomplishments. But where to go from here?
The most feasible way to not just expose but also escape the accomplishment trap, I think, is to shift the focus of satisfaction: from the future to the present, from the distant to the near, from the extraordinary to the mundane. I know, I know. It kind of sounds like a fortune cookie. However, I believe the underlying philosophy runs quite deep — and I dare say it has changed my life.
The idea is to invert the accomplishment trap. One big event may not guarantee lasting satisfaction, but many small events can get darn close. It could begin by noticing the seemingly trivial but reliably annoying interactions in daily life. These might range from a low-pressure shower head to bad lighting in your room to cluttered clothes in the back of your closet. Again, these seem like trivial issues. And to be fair, it’s a symptom of a privileged life to think about these kinds of things. But if, say, that trickling shower head only slightly annoys you each morning 365 days a year, then getting a new shower head might yield more satisfaction than winning a gold medal at the Olympic Games.
To sharpen this point, I’d say this. Be the type of person who gets obsessed with seemingly tiny details. Like, how the wood grain of your kitchen table looks. How the fabric of your clothes feels on your skin. How many trees you see on your commute to work. Get obsessed to the point where another person will say, “Are you crazy to put that much thought into such a trivial thing?”
What this other person doesn’t realize, of course, is that the pleasure to be gained from incrementally improving the tiniest things in daily life outscores the fleeting satisfaction of the wildest accomplishment a person could imagine. When you do the napkin math, it’s not even close.
The point here is not that striving toward accomplishments is vain altogether. It’s simply that we shouldn’t expect to gain lasting contentment from them. Real contentment lies in the everyday, the mundane, the trivial things that often don’t seem worth optimizing.
Nor is the point that the sole purpose of life is to maximize contentment. It’s more about the general shift in expectations that satisfaction does not manifest itself in the form of accomplishing milestones down the road. Instead, it can be found here, in reality, right now.
A few months ago, I graduated from another degree. This time, it wasn’t engineering but philosophy.
“Wow,” one friend tells me on the phone, “that’s a great accomplishment.”
“Thanks,” I say, “it’s pretty cool, I guess.”
A few moments later, I hang up and brew myself a cup of coffee, one of the most reliable sources of satisfaction that I know. As I take a sip, I begin to forget that I once wanted to be rich, successful, and respected.
I take another sip and feel at ease toward the possibility that I never will be.