Every morning as your incessant alarm wakes you up, you quietly make your mind run through the doldrums of the day and all the hours of work you need to slog through in order to get to the day when it finally pays off. You quell all your pleasure seeing desires in the hope of achieving the elusive state of happiness at a later stage. It comes to a point where your work starts consuming you and all of it amounts to nothing but an addiction.
They say, “Success is not the key to happiness, happiness is the key to success” but can success and long-term happiness ever truly be related in life or is it just a mental facade created by us to make ourselves strive for the unattainable.
However, the real question which most of us fail to ask ourselves is “Will all this ever pay off?”
Or have we set our arbitrary milestone of success so far away from our reality that we end up living each moment of our lives to attain the unattainable.
Or maybe it is neither. Maybe we do reach our goal and achieve the epitome of success as desired by us but when we do so, the dopamine hit of success is so short-lived that we soon find ourselves seeking for our next hit with desperation.
Logically, it does seem like some sort of addiction. Once you achieve something, your expectations rise in tandem, you get stuck in the success trap where you’re never truly satisfied. Like playing a tragic arcade game where you only want to score more but ‘more’ is never enough.
Though, it is important to differentiate between the factors that keep you going. You are embracing the whole concept of “Achieving success” in the right way if success to you is a byproduct of your efforts and attempts towards being the best possible version of yourself. However, you can’t let go of the rebellious streak of us millennials. We do everything for a reason. And for us, the motive is irrelevant as long as the end game is as desired. We do everything for the kick of it. And as far as getting caught up in the “success trap” is concerned, we do it for the adrenaline rush it equips us with.
Now that is where you need to slow down. Take a deep breath and acknowledge the fact that “success” is your drug and you my friend, are an addict. The very realisation of the fact that you’re letting go of your present for a future you’ll never truly have is the rehabilitation therapy you need.
So, in this world of a myriad people with even myriad views and goals; be the person who you are instead of running behind the person you want to be. For, life is not about running towards your destination but about living your journey.
Viddiie Shekhar
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