getting what you want isn’t always a good thing

“I think everybody should get rich and famous and do everything they ever dreamed of so they can see that it’s not the answer.” – Jim Carrey

“The minute you have the means to take responsibility for your own dreams and can be held accountable for whether they come true or not, life is a lot tougher. It’s easy to have wonderful thoughts when the chance to implement them is remote. When you’ve gotten to a place where you at least have a chance of implementing your ideas, there’s a lot more responsibility in that.” – Steve Jobs

“The problem with getting everything is you run out of reasons to keep trying, and human interaction becomes impossible due to imbalance. Hanging out in ibiza with a bunch of friends and partying with famous people, able to do whatever I want, and I’ve never felt more isolated. In sweden, I will sit around and wait for my friends with jobs and families to have time to do shit, watching my reflection in the monitor. When we sold the company, the biggest effort went into making sure the employees got taken care of, and they all hate me now Found a great girl, but she’s afraid of me and my life style and went with a normal person instead. I would Musk and try to save the world, but that just exposes me to the same type of assholes that made me sell minecraft again.” – Markus Persson, aka @notch, founder of Minecraft

Human wants are infinite, while the universe is finite. You have a limited amount of time and energy that you can expend towards getting what you want. And lots of people have reported that, after they’ve gotten what they want, they simply want more things. This seems like an important fact to reflect on. So you can’t get everything that you want. Sometimes you’ll hear people say things like, oh, celebrities and successful people who say things like this are just narcissists who want attention, who want people to feel sorry for them, boo-hoo successful people. But… what if there’s some truth in what they’re saying? Even if they’re self-serving narcissists, I don’t think they have any reason to lie about this. 

So… what’s the lesson here? Be careful what you wish for? Recognize in advance that getting everything you think you want isn’t necessarily going to make you happy, satisfied, fulfilled. Realize that there are costs to achieving your dreams that you might not even be aware of. Failure is painful, and success can be even more painful. The struggles inherent to life are almost inescapable. And yes, there are different classes of struggles, and some maybe are much worse than others. I find myself compelled to say that surely it’s worse to be poor than rich. I mean, who would argue with that? If you’re rich, you can always give everything away and be poor again. If you’re poor, you don’t really have a choice. 

And yet… I really wouldn’t be surprised if some of the most miserable people in the world are the wealthy ones. We have to be careful not to romanticize other people’s lives that we haven’t lived, but there are some signs. In Sebastian Junger’s Tribe, the author quotes several people who describe that they preferred life during a period of war or crisis that they lived through – that it brought people closer together, that they were less depressed, that things were more egalitarian. Wealthier people seem likelier to be depressed, and it seems like it may have some correlation with extrinsic values over intrinsic ones, prioritizing wealth over health and social well-being. 

I don’t know. I’m not an expert, and I’m not really looking to get into the precise science and studies that explore these in detail. You can feel free to dig into that stuff yourself if you’re curious. All I’m trying to do here is to question the received wisdom we’ve inherited about how we live, and the pursuit of material wants, of accomplishments and accolades. If you consider people’s deathbed regrets, the 5 major ones are: 

– I wish I had the courage to live a life true to myself 

– I wish I had the courage to express my feelings 

– I wish I had made more time for friends 

– I wish I didn’t work so hard 

– I wish I let myself be happy 

It seems likely that hardly anybody on their deathbed wishes that they had accumulated more things, that they had achieved more material success, that they had climbed higher on the corporate ladder. Those things don’t really matter when you’re about to die. What matters is knowing that you lived a good life, that you meant something to others, that the people you respected and admired, respected and admired you in turn. You can’t get everything you want. Living in this modern capitalistic world means being bombarded with messages that you should want more things, want more possessions, want more Likes on your polished Instagram photos. I find it helpful to think about life as a whole and compress it into days, weeks, months. If you had one day left to live, one week, one month, how would you like to spend it? 

In summary: You can’t get everything you want. You have to be strategic. You have to prioritize. You have to be okay with whatever you get. Be aware that there are costs to things that you want, or think you want. Strategize, prioritize and act with that awareness in mind.