Here's the thing: most of our goals aren't actually ours. They're borrowed desires, copied from someone else's highlight reel. We scroll through curated moments of other people's lives and unconsciously adopt their version of success as our own. That promotion they celebrated, that car they bought, that lifestyle they're living- suddenly these become our definitions of happiness, despite having no connection to who we actually are or what genuinely fulfills us.
I realized that many of us are unintentionally raising the barrier to our own happiness. Not because we want to suffer- but because we’re too busy chasing someone else’s version of happiness.
This creates three devastating patterns:
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We pick the wrong goals. What brought someone else joy won't necessarily bring us joy, but we discover this only after investing months or years chasing their dream instead of finding our own. We're essentially playing someone else's game with our own life as the stakes.
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We expect permanent happiness from temporary achievements. Every desire comes with an implicit promise: "This will finally make me happy." But happiness from external achievements is always fleeting. The promotion high fades, the new car becomes routine, the vacation ends. Then we're back to scrolling, hunting for the next thing that will supposedly complete us.
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We postpone present happiness for future satisfaction. This might be the craziest trick of all. Desires can become happiness prisons where we tell ourselves, "I'll be happy when I get X." What we're really saying is, "Only X can make me happy—until then, nothing else will." We've just sentenced ourselves to misery until further notice. Naval definitely said it better:
Desire is a contract that you make with yourself to be unhappy until you get what you want.
Maybe the real question isn't "What will make me happy?" but "What's stopping me from being happy right now?" Because often, it's just the story we're telling ourselves about why our current life isn't enough.
What if our goals weren’t borrowed but born from deep self-reflection and self-interospection?
What if we redefined success- not as what impresses others, but as what aligns with who we truly are?
What if we stopped borrowing other people's dreams and started paying attention to our own?