You hit the goal. It lands. Kind of. There’s that brief flicker of satisfaction—like a match flaring up in a windstorm. And then, almost on cue, the itch returns. You think about the next thing. The better version. The upgrade. Whatever it is you’re supposed to be wanting now.
Nobody warns you how fast a win can rot. Not because it’s not real—but because it was never built to hold your worth. At best, it’s a sugar hit. At worst, it’s proof that your idea of “enough” is broken.
They call it drive. Hustle. Vision. Give it a slick name and suddenly we’re worshipping it. But what we’re often dealing with is low-grade panic. Not the dramatic kind. Just the quiet buzz of “not yet,” running in the background while you smile and get shit done.
And we’re so used to it, we don’t even notice it’s fear.
Get the glow-up. Get the title. Get the relationship that doubles as a personality. Post it. Curate it. Perform it. Then scroll through five people doing it better and call it motivation. It’s a joke, except nobody’s laughing because we’re all in too deep.
At some point, I started noticing the pattern. I’d land something—something I’d worked for, wanted, bled over—and within days, I’d feel the same restlessness I’d felt before I even started. No high lasted. It never stuck. The bar always moved. I always moved it.
The embarrassing part? I thought that meant I was growing.
Turns out, I wasn’t evolving. I was spiraling—just with better vocabulary and nicer outfits.
I looked around and realized I didn’t actually care about most of the stuff I was chasing. I just wanted to stop feeling like I was behind. Like I had to earn stillness. Like I wasn’t allowed to exhale unless I had something shiny to show for it.
That’s what most of us are doing—just trying to buy the right to rest. Peace, but with receipts.
And it’s a scam.
You know what’s worse than not getting the thing you want? Getting it and realizing it didn’t fix anything. Now you’re not just tired, you’re also disillusioned. The blueprint lied. The game doesn’t end. You just get sneakier about calling your coping mechanisms “goals.”
You want relief, not results. But we’ve been trained to treat relief like a prize you earn, not a practice you learn.
Here’s where it got real for me: I stopped waiting for the checklist to empty before I allowed myself to feel okay. I stopped tying self-respect to output. I started treating “good enough” as something sacred, not shameful.
I stopped optimizing every quiet moment. And yeah, at first it felt like laziness. Like I was quitting the race. But it wasn’t a race. It was a loop. And I finally stepped off.
Peace isn’t thrilling. It’s not marketable. It won’t get you likes. Sometimes it’s boring. Sometimes it feels like failure. But it’s real. And it lasts longer than validation ever could.
This doesn’t mean you stop trying. It means you stop thinking that becoming more will finally make you enough.
The people who glow in the dark? They’re not the ones who’ve perfected their lives. They’re the ones who’ve made peace with the parts they’ll never fix. They laugh more. Apologize faster. Spend less time curating their image and more time living it.
And if you’re still stuck chasing—one more body goal, one more title, one more round of applause—you don’t need a productivity hack.
You need to stop moving long enough to ask: Who told you peace was something you had to earn?
That question wrecked me. In the best way.
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