It's so common for us to spend our lives dreaming about what the achievements will feel like that we have not really prepared ourselves for the idea that it might just feel… quiet.
Not negative. Not empty. Just quieter than you thought it would be.
Often times the dream is something that is far off in the distance, and elusive to us for many years. The university we want to get into, the major award we’d love to win, the works we want to have published, the jobs we want to have, and the person we dream of being when we finally achieve all of the above are dreams we spend our lives striving after.
Because the dream provides structure to your life and direction, it gives you something to aim for, to build towards, and to give you a sense of validity for those difficult times along the way.
What nobody tends to talk about though is after the dream has been attained.
After the email shows up, after you have graduated, won the award, published your work, got your dream job, there typically is not a huge transformation; instead, there tends to be just… stillness, and within that stillness, very often is confusion.
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Ambition is often attached to thoughts of one day, when everything will be clear and all effort put into becoming successful will culminate in feelings of satisfaction, achievement, and wholeness.
The anticipation of the dream creates an emotional framework to aid in the thoughtful execution of choices, habits, and identity. You convince yourself that the fatigue is only a temporary phase on the way to something greater. You allow for uncertainty because you believe that there will eventually be a destination.
However, when you finally reach your goal, nothing appears to have changed the next day. You wake up in the same physical space, with all of your thoughts, stresses, and feelings toward yourself still intact.
This unexpected outcome can leave you feeling very lost, especially if your self-image has been based on long-term goals of achievement. The dream is not simply a target; it provides a support system of direction, support, and motivation for the next version of you.
In short, once you stop pursuing the goal, you will find empty space where there had once been urgency.
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The Emotional Aftermath Nobody Advertises
We spend years preparing ourselves to succeed and almost nothing on how we are supposed to process emotionally when we do.
When people think of achievement it usually is looked at as an isolated event with a very clear end point. Most movies stop there, most speeches are over at that point, and most people's life stories reach a stopping point at the apex of achievement — all because society loves this idea of showing arrival with resolution.
But the process of living does not come to an end once the next level of accomplishment happens. Instead, in many ways it marks the beginning of the uncertainty of next.
Yes, there may be relief and gratitude. There may be some feeling of pride. However, there can also be so much fatigue from the build-up to reaching this pinnacle that one's ability to enjoy the feeling is diminished.
It may also be disappointing that reaching this level of success is not as much as you had anticipated. You may actually feel guilt for not being able to enjoy it as much as you thought you would, even though you were dying to reach that next level.
It can be a lonely road and in fact can even feel lonely to some along way when everybody sees the external success, but internally you feel a little lost.
When Achievement Becomes Identity
Many people are not just pursuing their dreams; rather, they are creating their lives around them.
As we work toward our goals, we become increasingly intertwined with them. This ultimately leads us to develop an internal story about who we will be after reaching our future goals: When I succeed at my dream, then I can be myself. Achieving our goals can thus evolve from being an external measure of success to an indicator of our worth.
As such, when we finish with our dreams, we will also often need to change our identity along with the ending of the pursuit of a dream.
If you were previously striving for your goal, who are you going to be now that you have completed your goal?
In many cases, this can be even more complex in an environment or industry that promotes high levels of ambition due to the nature of the success, both externally and internally. As a result, the act of being productive becomes a part of one’s personality. The act of being disciplined becomes a part of one’s identity. The act of pursuing success becomes so emotionally familiar.
Therefore, once we finish pursuing our goal (even just temporarily), our experience may seem to be one of being surrounded by open space without an initial direction.
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The Myth of Permanent Fulfillment
There's an unspoken belief associated with dreams: achievement will result in a lasting feeling of accomplishment, happiness, and certainty.
However, human emotions work differently than that.
Fulfillment is seldom fixed. It changes, and there are fluctuations as well. What appears to be impossible, eventually become ordinary by simply being experienced often enough.
This phenomenon, known as hedonic adaptation in psychology, refers to the emotional reaction of human beings as they adjust to new circumstances over time, regardless of how positive the adjustments are. What you may have considered life changing eventually becomes part of your "normal" experience.
While adjusting to change is a normal thing to undergo, causing this to occur can impact you negatively, especially if you've waited a long period thinking that the change would completely alter your emotional experiences from what you've experienced previously.
You'll then learn to adapt to that change.
You'll eventually see the dream manifesting itself to the point that over time it becomes something that you regularly experience as every day.
Grief for the Person Who Was Dreaming
A less-discussed aspect of success is grieving for the self that used to yearn for it.
There is a certain hopefulness in the act of dreaming about what you want. There is energy in the journey. There is imagination to be found in the unknown, and you always have a vision of the future where you will place yourself.
When you achieve your goal, your vision of the future — at least the one before you achieved it — is now reality.
And while this may carry a sense of joy, it also signifies that you must let go of an emotional attachment to the version of you who was waiting for the day they could experience what they had dreamed of. The you who thought about what it'd be like to achieve your goal will never again have that question to ponder.
There is a peculiar sense of loss in the letting go of this process.
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So, What Comes Next?
Eventually, the question changes from "How do I reach this dream?" to "How do I go on living after I reach this dream?" And, maybe, the answer is that meaning does not exist permanently in arrival alone. Arrival represents just one case; life is ongoing. If all your feelings are built on you reaching something, then once you reach that something, it will create instability within that emotional framework.
It seems that true fulfilment is obtained, not so much by reaching a goal, but rather by living a life that still has meaning after you have achieved all of your original goals. So, your curiosity continues to exist after your accomplishment. Your identity has more than just your productivity to define it. Your existence can also be validated in the here and now without having to be always pushing toward the next goal.
This is going to be more difficult to create because it requires you to learn how to exist without having something new.
Learning to Live Beyond the Goal
When external recognition is no longer an aspect of your life, you are left exposed to taking the chance to ask yourself what you really enjoy.
- What are the things you love that have no relation to what you do or accomplish?
- How do you see yourself when you're not in the process of proving something?
Because so many driven individuals are used to moving forward all the time, these types of questions can often provoke feelings of discomfort as you experience stillness in new ways. Yet, it's in the discomfort that you can discover that you can have purpose and meaning in your life without always feeling as though you're climbing the ladder of life.
Meaning does not require every moment to lead to something bigger.
The Dream Was Real. So Is Everything After It.
Accomplishment can be meaningful, dreams are significant, ambition has value. The experience of putting hard work into something important and achieving it can create lasting memories, positively change your outlook on life, and/or give you cause to celebrate and feel good about yourself.
However, perhaps the error comes when we assume that we've reached the end of the emotional journey with the completion of fulfilling our dreams.
After the congratulations are completed and when the accomplishments are reflected upon, knowing that your future vision is now present, there remains a human asking what comes next.
That question could represent that your dream was unsuccessful; yet, that question could simply show that you continue to be an emotionally mature adult.
