From year to year and all the months in between, achievements are everything to us.
We join mixers and dating sites to find “the one.” We hustle hard in order to make a lucrative side hustle or have financial stability. People study extensively to get into a good school, get scholarships, and get professional licenses.
For some, they might miss the mark and fail, but for some, they get lucky and succeed. In fact, they succeed so much they continue to succeed and thrive in that space. Win after win feels like a rush until suddenly it stops.
Victories stop hitting the same way as before. You feel stuck. You feel nervous or worried suddenly, and you’re not sure why. All of these feelings culminate in a simple question:
Why are achievements making me feel so empty all of a sudden?
It’s a reasonable question to ask and explore as we all hit these mid-life crises in our lives. We often feel the urge to do something wild to mix up our lives and make it interesting. In some cases it’s irrational behaviour, like splitting off from your partner or going all in on some new and risky side hustle. But what I have in mind is something simpler.
A small mindset shift and learning exactly why we feel this way and the urge to make our lives interesting.
By doing so, we can change our lives in far healthier ways while figuring ourselves out.
3 Sources For Why Achievements Feel Empty
Achievements Lack Because We’re Dopamine Addicts
From what I’ve gathered, there are three main culprits that I can point to that are the problem. Worse, they all work in conjunction with one another, making the problem more complex than expected. The first of these issues is dopamine overload, and it’s easy to see why.
In our fast-paced society, we’ve set ourselves in an environment where we crave more but also want it now. Because of this overdose, we develop unhealthy relationships with what we’ve been pursuing.
So much so that deep down we can see the very achievements as obstacles.
It’s arguably the mindset that a lot of rich individuals espouse deep down. We see this fully with billionaires who continue to grow their net worth, despite it being unnecessary. The more you try to push higher, the more estranged you can become to those around you. This can also be on top of caring less and less about those around you for the sake of getting more of what you’re craving.
Overall, it creates environments where one values short-term gains over long-term results. Worse, it creates situations where the short-term demands are unreasonable.
An example of this was back in 2015 when I attended an accounting panel at the university I graduated from.
In the midst of the panel, one of the panellists, a local businessman, said something startling. He encouraged us all to get Master’s Degrees because we would become unhirable before long.
After all, the market of college and Bachelor degree accountants is “oversaturated” right now.
Never mind the people who just want to be bookkeepers or work for a small or medium-sized business.
For me, it turned me off from even trying because it felt like the same hiring practices I’ve heard before. Specifically the ones that demand years of experience for entry-level positions.
The only difference is that a Master’s Degree isn’t cheap.
It’s absolutely absurd but speaks to the expectation that every company wants. This expectation that their employees must be the absolute best right out of the box.
The issue with constantly seeking that high leads to a warped view of our goals and what we consider a meaningful life.
We’re Experiencing Achievement Depression
The second possibility is something called achievement depression. It’s a psychological condition, and the reason we call it “achievement depression” is how similar it feels to actual depression.
Feelings of sadness, that aforementioned emptiness, or disillusionment that is created almost immediately after achieving a significant goal in your life. Staying in that environment only makes things worse as anxiety seeps in, as well as lack of motivation.
The source for this depression can stem from a lot of things. Feelings of losing your purpose in life, setting too high expectations, being socially isolated when working to achieve that goal, or anxiety around the question “what’s next?” or a mixture are all valid sources.
Regardless, it creates this sense of just coasting through life with no real reason or clear direction, and trying to get yourself back on track by setting another goal isn’t really the answer.
It reminds me a lot of a strategy I heard that was unusual but subtly manipulative.
Once you finish this task, work on the next. As a treat.
On paper, it seems like a reasonable thing. Scratching an item off a to-do list is satisfying. And having the joy of working on the next task on the list you created for yourself seems nice. Surely every item you put on the list is something that sparks joy for you, right?
Well, just like the season finale or getting caught up on a favourite show, it’s not always so simple. For avid fans, a feeling of dread can overtake us as we inch closer to a conclusion. Worse, it can spoil our mood when watching the last episodes. The reality is that you have to wait several more days or until next week for the next episode to come out.
And while with life, there is no end to problems, there is a case to slow down and actually enjoy what we’ve built.
If we spend all of our time building and reward ourselves with more building, we’re not building a sustainable life. We’re becoming workaholics. A thing that’s arguably worse than suffering from achievement depression.
We Obsess Over Achievements Too Much
The final avenue boils down to the relationship with goals or achievements themselves. As I hinted at a little in the earlier part of the video, dopamine and the environment that we’re in can affect how we see goals and achievements, but what I didn’t bring up is how our mindsets can also affect it too.
Take new years resolutions. Beyond the fact that a lot of us don’t actually achieve them in the first place, it’s worth looking at those who actually do hit their targets or make an effort to work towards them.
Even if these things are big and crucial, like losing weight, hitting an income target, writing a book, or something else, it’s hard to say whether achieving those things actually contributed to an individual’s happiness.
From big promotions to achieving results all around, one thing is clear about our society right now:
We love those things, and we place more value on those things above all else.
We’re willing to brush aside inconveniences or problem behaviour so long as numbers keep climbing up and we get those juicy results that we’re looking for. We’ve seen this over the years as people who shouldn’t have been in leadership are taking over leadership roles for the sole reason of them bringing results on a lower position.
In short, this creates a disconnection between people. We consider those with high grades or people with a lot of money as inherently smarter people than those with lower grades or who are poor, even though those qualities aren’t synonymous.
We still believe in the “starving artist” even though we have people like Taylor Swift, an artist, worth billions of dollars.
The list goes on, but this particular aspect comes down to our mindset and what we’ve chosen to cling to and never question. It’s a mindset that’s been developed in those environments that we’re introduced to and never bothered to challenge or ask different questions to.
Questions that we should honestly be asking more these days.
What Can We Do?
In order to change one’s mindset or relationship with something, we must first look into our own selves and explore it. We need to be able to ask ourselves questions and adapt and change.
Because at the end of the day, we’re all going to be dramatically different people than who we are right now. So we might as well be a little deliberate about some of the changes we make in our lives, right?
So the next time you achieve something big or even a small thing, I want you to reframe the question that comes up after you cross that off your list.
Instead of saying “what’s next?” or “what did I achieve?”, ask yourself any of these questions:
- What moments made me feel truly alive?
- What did I learn about myself through this?
- What actual benefit did I gain from this? Am I able to share this with other people?
These are all crucial questions because I think for a lot of us deep down, we’ve missed out on what striving for goals and hitting achievements was meant to be like. For sure, they’re arbitrary numbers or figures, but they’re not just that.
These are our arbitrary numbers. These are our objectives that we value. And the act of dehumanizing them, crushing them, failing to hit them is akin to not caring about our own feelings and what makes us human beings.
Goals and achievements have always been what guides us through life and gives us a sense of purpose, but at some point in time, I feel we’ve lost that. So by asking ourselves those questions and answering them and working on shifting our mindset and our relationship with those aspects, I’m sure that we can get back to those joys.
Or else we will all become nothing but shells of ourselves.