Almost everybody believes that a certain day is coming. Not a date on a calendar, but a day after which the wanting will finally stop, because there will be nothing left to want. People work towards it the way anybody works towards something they are completely sure about, without ever asking why they are so sure. And for some the day does come, more or less on the schedule they set for it. What happens on that day is worth describing plainly, because nobody describes it, and somebody should.
Nothing happens. A person stands in the middle of everything they asked for and inside them there is no sound at all. Not happiness, not relief, not even disappointment, which at least would be something. They keep waiting for the feeling to arrive a little later, in the evening perhaps, or the following week, the way a letter arrives long after the person who sent it has forgotten writing it. It does not arrive, and after some months they stop listening for it.
And none of this can be said to a single person. How would anybody say it out loud? They have what almost everybody around them is still working towards, and to say they feel nothing sounds like ingratitude, and like an insult to people still struggling for far less. So it stays inside, and a thing kept inside does not stay the same size. It grows quietly in the dark while they go on smiling at dinner and answering questions about how good all of it must feel.
The ache was never hunger
For years the assumption is that what is felt inside is hunger. That is the natural assumption and it is the one everybody around us confirms. Something aches, so we look for what is missing, and this world is extremely generous with suggestions about what is missing. More work, more money, more recognition, a better title, a bigger house, another year of effort. So we eat, and we eat for twenty years, and we do it very well.
Then the plate goes down, completely full, and the ache has not moved an inch. That is where something becomes clear that takes a long time to accept. If a thing does not go away after it has been fed everything a person has, then it was never hunger in the first place. It was something else, and half a life was spent giving it the wrong food and calling that a life. The achievements were not fraudulent, they were real and difficult and they cost a great deal. They were simply the wrong answer to a question nobody had ever said out loud.
What was the question then? Nobody knows. That is the honest position, arriving at exactly the point in a life when a person is supposed to have all the answers. They have become somebody others come to for clarity. Inside there is a long quiet corridor with no light at the end of it and no name for what is being looked for. It could not be described to anybody even if there were somebody to describe it to.
What the emptiness might actually be
Emptiness is treated as a problem to be solved, an error in the machinery, something that has gone wrong and must be corrected quickly before anybody notices. That reaction is completely understandable. But it is worth wondering whether the emptiness is the error at all. What if it is the one honest thing left in a life that has become entirely about the outside? What if it is not a fault but the only part of a person that has refused to be bought?
Consider it this way. Everything in us that could be satisfied by achievement has been satisfied, thoroughly, and there is nothing more to be done in that direction. So whatever is still aching is, by definition, the part that achievement cannot reach. That part was always there. It was simply drowned out for thirty years by the noise of the running, and now that the running has stopped it can be heard for the first time.
It is not new. The listener is. And it speaks very softly, in a language nobody was taught, about a life that has not been lived. The words are not easy to make out and perhaps never become clear. But once it has been heard that something is there, nobody goes back to pretending the corridor is empty.
Why nobody prepares us for this
We are prepared very thoroughly for the wanting. From childhood we are taught how to want, what to want, how to measure whether we are getting it, and how to compare our amount with somebody else's amount. Every year of an education is a training in wanting, and most of what is called ambition is simply that training working as designed. Nobody spends even one afternoon preparing anybody for the morning after they get it. There is no lesson for that anywhere, in any school, in any country.
So when it comes, each person assumes they are the only one it has ever happened to, and that something must be particularly wrong with them. There is not. It happens to almost everybody who arrives, and most of them keep quiet about it for exactly the same reason. Each of them sits alone in a room believing themselves the only defective person in a world of contented people. And all of those rooms are full.
What the emptiness is for, nobody can say. But something changes in the people who stop trying to fill it. When it stops being treated as a hole it begins to feel less like a hole and more like a door. Very few go through. Most only come to know that it is there, and that for thirty years they stood in front of it with their backs turned, working extremely hard.
