the hidden incompleteness behind ambition

and the virtue of calibrating to your desires

[I put the podcast episode above ⬆️​ if you prefer to listen to this piece rather than read it! My podcast ‘Conscious | Unconscious’ is here on the Substack app and also on Spotify, Apple and a few more.]

This might be a controversial piece, because I want to dismantle the value of ambition, of striving to ‘succeed,’ and to propose an alternative to the kind of goal setting which is enslaved to both.

Enlightenment is not an achievement, it is an understanding that there is nothing to achieve, nowhere to go. You are already there—you have never been away. You cannot be away from there. ~ Osho

As a young college student, I used to go for long runs. I did it for many reasons—exercise, grounding, nature, integration time after an intensive class schedule. But mostly I did it because it fuelled my dreaming. Always, as the endorphins kicked in, I’d start fantasizing about the success I intended for myself. I’d think about my future career, my future family, imagining all the potential points of congratulation on my timeline. My future-focused excitement probably ramped up my speed and endurance and pushed my running further, faster.

I was addicted to running and I was addicted to my ambition. A perfect symbiotic partnership.

Seems so innocent, right? The culture expects youthful ambition, or at least, the American culture of my youth seemed to expect it. But rarely do we question the meaning of the ‘success’ we are encouraged to aspire to—I certainly didn’t. Has anything changed in 30 years? I doubt it. In any case, behind all my youthful enthusiasm, buried beneath firing synapses, coated in endorphins, marinated in dopamine, the truth was:

I never felt like I was enough without some grand plan for my future.

I needed goals and the anticipation of success not just to fuel my forward motion, but also for basic contentment.

I now understand, with the wisdom of age, the gift of failure, and after years of contemplative practice and spiritual study, that both aspiring for success and experiencing failure are merely different ways of externalizing the sense of one’s incompleteness.

Of my incompleteness.

I aspired to future-oriented ‘success’ to dissuade myself of my unworthiness, and all my perceived failures seemed to confirm this same unworthiness.

I wish I could go back in time and tell my 18-21 yo self that success is never, never enough. Tell her to seek contentment day to day. To follow her desires rather than the ‘shoulds’ and the cacophony of wounded parts vying for attention. But she didn’t even have a vocabulary for wounding then, much less the capacity to see it.

Nowadays, there is an overabundance of proof that ‘success’ rarely, if ever, leads to satisfaction, so much proof that you’d think we would all be cultivating the present moment from kindergarten and reconceptualizing notions like mission, purpose, career, and income-generation. We should clearly be raising our children with different values. Instead, individually and collectively, desiring success and working towards it are so utterly embedded into the collective unconscious that I can only view ‘the success narrative’ as more than just a paradigm; like with my running, it’s a collective addiction.

Harvard Professor Arthur Brooks, who has spent years researching the connection between what we deem ‘success’ and the internal state of ‘satisfaction’ writes:

The insatiable goals to acquire more, succeed conspicuously, and be as attractive as possible lead us to objectify one another, and even ourselves. When people see themselves as little more than their attractive bodies, jobs, or bank accounts, it brings great suffering…You become a heartless taskmaster to yourself, seeing yourself as nothing more than Homo economicus. Love and fun are sacrificed for another day of work, in search of a positive internal answer to the question Am I successful yet? We become cardboard cutouts of real people.

How did we get ourselves into this mess anyway? Is it social media? Ah, alas, as much as I’d like to blame Tik Tok, it pre-dates even the information age. I must briefly digress with a mini history lesson (the social-political scientist in me will have her say for approximately three paragraphs).

Goals, the ‘success narrative’ and meritocracy

In our modern era, the success narrative began with industrialization.

Mass production (think factories and mechanization) required measurable outputs, targets, strict working hours — every means was in service to an end. The public school system fell quickly into line. Although modern schooling has its roots in the Prussian military, in service to the empire’s imperative to create good soldiers, with industrialisation, the Capitalist machine took over. Driven by an economy of scale that required fewer peasants and demanded more urban employees, governments recognized schooling as the perfect way to mold reliable cogs in the machine. Public education offered a democracy of opportunity, so that no one was spared a chance to be trained for the new economy, irrespective of socioeconomic status.

So it was that pedagogy adopted a paradigm aligned with the needs of industrialisation. It provided pathways to productive citizenry: children should be useful and obedient. In other words, school is meant to equip the child with the means to become successful. Don’t just take my word for it, check out John Taylor Gatto and his Underground History of American Education.

We’ve all literally been indoctrinated into a culture of accomplishment, whose goal-oriented, outcome-oriented emphasis, in the context of industrialisation and modern schooling, as well as the free market of modern capitalism, gave rise to meritocracy.

Meritocracy is a social system in which success and status in life depend primarily on individual talents, abilities, and effort. It is a social system in which people advance on the basis of their merits. A meritocratic system contrasts with aristocracy, for which people advance on the basis of the status and titles of family and other relations. Thought.Co

No longer are we seen to be the victims of the class and circumstances we were born into. Now, anyone can rise above their circumstances with enough skill, talent, and effort, starting in the school system.

But this is terribly dangerous, because as the philosopher Alain de Botton points out, this belief in merit damns those who do not rise above their circumstances. Failure, or the failure to be ‘at the top’ is thus a moral failure, not a circumstantial one, or — as it might have been viewed in the 19th century — simply a result of being unfortunate. If you’re not successful, you just haven’t done the right things, so it’s your fault.

[As an aside, there are streams of Law of Attraction and manifestation thinking that unconsciously fall into the praying-mantis-like jaw of unthinking meritocratic principles. These are the shades of ‘you’re poor because you’re just not visualizing success well enough; you don’t have a high enough vibration; think and grow rich!" This can extend to illness: “you’d heal if you just believed in your own healing more.” My point is, meritocracy denies systemic disempowerment, including inherited trauma family systems, and robs us of compassion and insight into how disadvantaged groups are fucked by systems and paradigms.]

Back to success and goals and failure and unworthiness. The success narrative haunts me. It informs the paradigm of a generation, if not generations, mine and my parents, and has infiltrated my worldview to the extent that I have many times felt lesser than because of my financial status, such as the fact that I don’t own a home, that I focused on my children rather than career, that I don’t have certain tangible ‘merits’.

So, what about goals? Can we separate success from goal-setting?

Until very recently I have basically been the Queen of Goal-Setting. Even in my therapeutic work, early on, I’d encourage goals because when someone is sitting in reactivity, in a dysregulated nervous system, perhaps experiencing Victim consciousness »

having a future-oriented focus can motivate, inspire, and heal.

We usually refer to this future-oriented focus as having a goal. However, this is more than just a semantic debate, because goals are wedded to the notion of ‘success’, since when a goal is achieved, that outcome is deemed successful. Having a goal is pretty much impossible without defining, in advance, what the outcome will be, and without thinking in a framework of success or failure.

This is where things become tricky. Having goals is part of being human at this stage of human development, in our current paradigm. It’s language we can’t easily talk our way out of. But make no mistake, seeing the world through a lens of goals which are oriented towards notions of success is tantamount to giving unworthiness a front-and-centre seat at the theatre of our life’s drama.

The exception might be having a goal for a thing to perform its function— to build a house so that its habitable, for example. Or if the goal is experiential rather than comparative (winning/award/promotion), performative, or definitive in terms of outcome. A perfect example of this is how war veterans can be redeemed from life-destroying PTSD with surfing programs. In this case the ‘goal’ is the experience of learning, rather than being held to a standard of achieving a certain competency level.

The problem is that when a competitive, performative, or concrete-outcome-based goal is achieved, and success attained, as Professor Brooks points out, dissatisfaction looms. Whether we fail or succeed, the not-enough takes the prize.

In my client work, I have started to encourage desires and dreams instead of goals. To emphasize experiences, such as surfing for veterans, for example. I suggest fixing on a dream landscape and inhabiting its emotional space, rather than focusing on tangible numbers, titles, or accomplishments.

Instead of, what are your goals? I ask, what experiences do you desire for yourself and your life?

On a path of spiritual awakening, desire trumps goals

I think of desires as God’s little clues, gold fairy dust leading us to the perfect next step. In the Way of Mastery, the author (Jeshua) again and again encourages that we always follow our desires, listening deeply the subconscious clues that can show us our shadows and our gifts, our practical talents and tangible preferences, as well as our potential.

It is my experience that when we become finely calibrated to our true desires, once we do the shadow work to quieten the voice of our exiled parts, our pain bodies, the ancestral attachments that are not and never were ours, once we do all that, through our desires, our souls speak to us.

Michael Singer, in his book the Surrender Experiment, followed his desires, and then was available for the invitations that life presented him. He didn’t set out to have a multi-million dollar company. He just did stuff he loved, and opportunities arose; he listened, he trusted, he followed.

Could life be that easy? Is that the way to experience contentment, to be self-actualized? I suspect so, though I am new to this way of being.

Life has no meaning. Each of us has meaning and we bring it to life. It is a waste to be asking the Question when you are the answer.

~ Joseph Campbell, Pathways to Bliss: Mythology and Personal Transformation

The Ego Co-opts Success

Of course there’s also the very concept of ‘identity’ or ‘ego’ itself, and the human drive to create and defend it. The human ego is actually that part of the psyche mired in the body’s temporality. Linked to the brain stem, that reptilian brain whose sole raison d’être is survival. It needs control. And control finds an ally in ambition, as we believe ourselves capable of controlling time itself: our future.

But the ego also desires specialness. It is like a little inner drama queen who not only wants to be special, but also wants to be the arbiter of meaning — to have the final say on everything. It constructs itself with life’s endless material. It enlists paradigms in service to its agenda.

A success-obsessed culture is a handy tool for the ego, whose very nature is to define its worth, and thus assigns to identity the ultimate labels: success or failure.

When the ego settles down, when it exists in service to the Soul, or alongside it, or in any case, when it’s not driving the bus all by itself anymore, what then? I think that’s when desire really can become the fairy dust that we follow to the magic that life has been waiting to show us all this time.

Until, eventually, desires lead us to a state in which there are no longer desires.

Enlightenment is when all hope disappears. Don't be disturbed when I say that enlightenment is a state of hopelessness—it is not negative. Hope arises no more; desire is created no more. Future disappears. When there is no desire there is no need for the future.

~ Osho

the end of goals

I once had a very entrenched ‘self-criticism habit’. I overanalyzed past professional endeavors and measured them against a constantly wavering inner standard of ‘success,’ and constantly proclaimed that I fell short of my own ever-morphing standards.

In other words, I could never get to ‘success’ and so lived in a sense of perceived failure. What’s worse, even in those moments when I achieved something I set out to achieve, instead of feeling successful, I felt incomplete.

That has changed now, since menopause, since the latest deepening into awakened life.

I realized one day that I couldn’t bring myself to have goals anymore.

I realized that the happy novelist is the one who is happy when not writing a novel; the happy therapist is the one who is happy when the phone is not ringing and the clients aren’t there; the happy mother is the one who is happy when the children aren’t home, or have grown up.

In other words, happiness exists in the spaces between. In the ordinary moments, when there is no activity, no goal, and no role that one is playing. Those are the most predominant moments in life. Moments of success or even failure are fleeting. The time between them is vast.

It’s in those in-between moments that desire has a chance to arise and orchestrate my life with deliciousness and grace.

If I am slow to apply this in any one context, it’s only due to the shadow parts where wounding has a greater voice, where my ego has demanded proof of worthiness. Not to mention, goal-setting is a hard habit to break! I constantly catch myself in this linguistic trap, using ‘goal’ when I am future-focused, thinking about what I would like to see happen in life. When I want to control an outcome.

I have desires. I have dreams. I have circumstances I’d like to experience, and I might indulge in a fantasy now and again. My ‘plans’ are now my desires carried forward in time. I exercise great restraint in putting a timeframe or a parameter on anything. I desire to live in the country one day. To own a little home. To have a dog again (if the ninja feline will allow it). To have more readers here on Substack (please share this article if you feel moved!).

My right-now desires are always the most potent because when I’m listening, there is a subterranean force that moves me to do exactly-what-needs-doing, and in so doing, situates me with ease in the flow of life.

There are still dark corners of my psyche where the not-enough lurks, but I am ever softening into worthiness and allowing desire overtake goals with every breath.

Can you think of a context in which striving for success or having goals is not at all linked to self-concepts of unworthiness? Please comment! I am open to not knowing what I don’t know or haven’t considered!

thanks for reading everyone xx

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