There is a particular experience that people who get what they want do not often describe, and it should be described somewhere by somebody. Everything set out for arrives. It is planned carefully, worked at with real determination over long periods, and it comes, roughly when it was planned to come, one item after another for twenty years.
And rather than producing satisfaction, this eventually produces something nobody anticipates, which is a fear of wanting anything further. Because it has been learnt that whatever is wished for will probably come, and that when it comes it will bring with it a set of obligations that were not counted, and that the wanting itself will not stop when it arrives.
That is a strange place to arrive at. Most people spend their whole lives hoping their wishes will be granted. Nobody at twenty-five would believe that having them granted ends here, in a kind of cautiousness about desiring anything at all.
The line moves
Everybody has noticed this and almost nobody acts on it. An amount is set, and it is reached, and within a very short time that amount is simply normal and there is a new amount. Not because anybody is greedy or ungrateful, and the accusation of greed misses what is happening entirely. It happens because the eye adjusts to whatever it is looking at, and then requires more light to register the same brightness.
This can be watched happening in a matter of weeks by anybody paying attention. A thing that would have astonished them two years ago becomes the ordinary background condition, entirely invisible, and the only visible thing in the whole picture is the gap between here and the next place. The gap is always the same size, which should tell us something.
Which means the arrangement is not designed to conclude. It cannot conclude. There is no amount at which something that adjusts to every amount will stop adjusting, and anybody waiting for that day is waiting for something that cannot happen. People wait for it for twenty years without once examining whether it could arrive.
What it costs to keep raising it
The cost is not mainly the work, although the work is real and considerable. The cost is that a person who is always slightly behind their own standard never actually gets to be anywhere. Every present moment becomes a staging area for a better one, and since this is true at every single point, no point is ever arrived at by anybody.
There is also what it does to what has already been gained. Things fought hard for become invisible within months. Not undervalued exactly, because their value would be defended if challenged. Simply not seen, because attention has already moved to the gap. And the people nearby can tell, even when nothing is said, that what they are part of is being treated as a stage on the way to somewhere else.
And there is the accumulation. Each thing acquired brings commitments with it, and commitments cannot easily be put down once other people have arranged themselves around them. After twenty years there is a very large quantity of obligation attached to things that were once entirely optional. Most of it is no longer wanted, and all of it will be carried.
The wanting is not the problem
The answer is not to stop wanting. That advice is given constantly and it has never once worked in anybody, including in the people who give it. Wanting is how anything gets made and how anybody moves. A person with no desire at all is not serene, whatever they say. They are usually just tired.
What can change is not the quantity of wanting but a question asked beforehand instead of afterwards. What will this actually give us, and is that in fact the thing we are short of? Most of the time the honest answer is that it will give a temporary relief from a discomfort that is not about the thing at all, which is expensive medicine for a condition it does not treat.
Things still get wanted and probably always will. Fewer of them, and with rather better knowledge of what they will and will not do once they arrive. There is a whole category that stops being bothered with, once it has finally been admitted what was actually being bought, and that it was never available in that shop.
