The Dreams That Don't Come True

I was watching this video the other day of NBA Kevin Love's house tour (classic YouTube rabbit hole) and was struck by something he said in the first minute:

About his stunning NYC penthouse: "When I was 17 or 18 years old, I wrote that I would have a New York apartment by the time I was 30 years old. A few months before I turned 30, I signed the papers and took the keys, and the rest is history."

We hear this all the time. Famous people who put their future success on a vision board, wrote about it in a journal, talked about it on a video, or repeated it over and over in their minds. After listening to enough of these stories, it's easy to wonder why your own dreams haven't come true yet. Why not you?

How many lost or unrealized dreams are sitting in people's old goal planners and notebooks and audio files and emails? How many of us are walking around feeling like we've got all this untapped potential sitting dormant inside of us and if only we could do a little bit more of A or be a little bit more like B, we could’ve seen those visions come to life.

I am the poster child for feeling this way. I regularly go to bed feeling like I didn't do enough, wasn't present enough, failed to be productive enough, didn't connect enough.

Not enough, not enough, not enough.

We all want our equivalent of thee NYC penthouse, and we attribute our lack of having whatever that thing is (a house, a relationship, an amount of money in the bank, a bunch of followers, etc) to some sort of internal defect.

Over the past year, I've come to realize this pattern of thinking—that where we are, who we are, and what we do simply isn't enough—is a harmful belief structure etched into us by hustle culture, consumerism, the mythological American Dream ("pulling yourself up by your bootstraps" is a statistical improbability in this country), and the widespread acceptance that busy is better. As if these cultural challenges weren't enough, the opaque dynamics of social media and social stratification proliferate the problems.

I don't know about you, but I'm tired of it. I'm tired of the constant groundswell of anxiety. I'm tired of the constant subtle, unintentional comparison games social media forces us to play should we choose to use them. I'm tired of feeling like I haven't done enough. I don't need to earn anything to be worthy of my beautiful life full of things I'm grateful for, and neither do you.

The happiest people I know don't own NYC penthouses. The happiest people I know have racked up plenty of failures, unrealized dreams, setbacks, and scars.

So, what gives?

My boy Chamath (I don't know him, but my vision board tells me that I will someday) describes it painfully well in this interview (right around 27 minutes in):

"So many of us are unfortunately raised in an environment where we can be tricked into feeling inadequate...At any point in the day, do you feel inadequate when you're on the phone and interacting? Do you feel jealous or envious? [Everyone raises their hands]. Can you imagine the impact of that when it gets compounded day after day, year after year? My advice is to find ways of breaking that cycle...the most important thing is to figure out how you yourself are wired." On social media specifically, he says, "Your internal sense of fulfillment and belonging has definitely changed because there are people around you now that can amplify the message that they are happier. But they're not—they're just marketing happiness better than you."

He goes on to talk about how the richest people in the world, many of whom he's interacted with, are all deeply insecure. That there seems to be a positive correlation between the amount of [financial] success and the amount of insecurity.

In other words, the bigger the NYC penthouse, the more problematic.

Of course, this isn't always true. We can find plenty of examples of people who are wealthy AND happy. But I think it begs us to reconsider that the path to wealth and the path to happiness are the same—they aren't.

And this, of course, ties back to the initial point: We cannot hustle, buy, or social climb our way to happiness.

Happiness is: Solving hard problems in thoughtful ways while still caring for yourself and those around you.

Unhappiness is: Grinding away for 14 hours a day because you think that's what it takes to be successful.

Happiness is: Taking days off, going for walks, having long talks with good friends, getting good sleep, reading actual books, playing sports with friends, cooking a delicious meal, finishing a meaningful project.

Unhappiness is: Never using your "unlimited" vacation days, feeling stressed when you don't get through your massive to-do list, working your ass off for too little pay and resenting everyone around you, being glued to your phone or the news for hours a day.

Happiness is: Having a vision board, a goal list, an intention, and dream—and also being okay with the setbacks, the fears, the limiting beliefs, the lucky breaks, the unlucky breaks, the twists and turns, and the divine timing that you'll inevitably experience on your life journey.

Unhappiness is: Having a vision board, a goal list, an intention, and dream—and expecting all to go as planned. Unhappiness is feeling like your life isn't enough and you aren't enough when fear or failure shows up.

Unhappiness is: Chasing after everything you think you need.

Happiness is: Giving away everything you think you want.

If you want to feel like you are enough and your life is enough, do a little something every day to move down your version of the happy path. This is not an aphorism; this is a legitimate call to making some intentional, often difficult decisions about what really matters to you—and the people, roles, ideas, and sunk costs you have to live with as a result. Choosing the happy path is downright hard at many crossroads, but the reward is living an actually authentic life, free of bullshit, anxiety, stress, and a constant, grinding climbing up an unfulfilling mountain that never ends.

Maybe along the way, you'll realize the life you've been fighting so hard for has nothing to do with that NYC penthouse on your vision board after all.

Maybe the life you actually want the most is right here, right now—one walk, one phone call, one leap, one moment of forgiveness, one courageous conversation, or one act of radical self-care away.

There are unlimited ways to find out—go choose your own adventure.

Footnote: In beautiful irony, Kevin Love’s house tour is infused with self-awareness about inner anxiety, systemic cultural challenges, and never losing sight of what matters most. I can’t help but think, given his own journey, that Kevin is one of the people who figured out the wealth path and the happiness path are not synonymous, and chose to intentionally pursue the latter alongside the former.