Comment by madaxe_again

Hm. I think Proust put it well:

Desire makes everything blossom and flourish. Possession makes everything wither and fade.

I’m a lucky son of a gun. Managed to slap the eject button on the treadmill early enough in life that I found myself in my early 30s with all the time in the world, and enough cash that it certainly felt like it.

I went and lived so many dreams. Did a whole bunch of things I had already, in my decade long hermitage of empire building, decided would likely never happen.

It’s a decade later. There isn’t an experience or a thing, short of holidaying on the moon, that I haven’t fulfilled.

It’s terrible. It turns out that wanting something, striving for it, was an awful lot more fun than having it. Great; I’ve caught the mailman - now what?

I’ve ended up retreating, wanting less and less - I now live in a cabin in the woods, not because it’s what I want, per se, but because it’s satisfying in ways that my “dreams” aren't.

It’s odd. I do find myself wondering if this is something internal to us, or if it’s acculturated - that is, are we taught to be tantalus, to dangle a reward just beyond our own grasp so that we might justify striving - or are we born with it, the hunter anticipating fresh meat tonight?

Me, I’ve learned to instead derive satisfaction from the absolutely mundane, because the extraordinary wasn’t really any better.

Anyway. These are hardly new problems. Epicurus mused on what dreams were worth having - which grew a person, which diminished them. Aristotle would say happiness is not a state of attainment or possession but one of activity, of working towards a goal. Diogenes would say “mate, all you need in life is a barrel”, and he’d be right.

I suppose my takeaway from all of it can be summed up as “Do not let imagined futures supersede contact with the present.”