Some lessons can't be taught. It doesn't matter how many times you hear it, how patiently they say it, how badly you want to get it. It just never clicks. There are many unteachable lessons. Here is a familiar one you have probably heard more than once.
Money won't make you happy. It is always said by the people who already have it, so the natural reaction is rolling your eyes and thinking, easy for you to say. It is hard to relate to, so it lands like a joke, the kind of advice you can only give from the top of the mountain, looking down at the rest of us still climbing.
I used to think that too. Then I understood why they keep saying it, even though I have not lived it myself yet.
The idea is simple. Some lessons cannot be taught. They can only be lived. You can read it, nod at it, even repeat it to someone else, and still not believe it, not really, not until you have climbed the whole mountain yourself and stood at the top and felt the disappointment in your own body. The view was not the thing. But you had to see the view to know that.
So far, nothing new, right? But here is the part that caught my attention when I first heard it. It is easier to get the thing than to stop wanting it. Let me say that again. It is easier to go out and get it than to genuinely stop wanting it. Picture this.
Say you want a car. A specific one, the one that means you made it. You could try to sit quietly and talk yourself out of wanting it. Go full monk about it. Meditate, breathe, remind yourself it is just metal and rubber that will not change who you are. Good luck. The want is sticky. It sits in the back of your mind as a what if, and it will not leave on the strength of an argument.
So what's the other option? You go get it. You work, you save, you sacrifice, and you cross it off the list. And only then, flying down the highway with the music loud, does the truth finally land, the one you could never have argued your way to. This is just metal. The problem I was trying to fix is still here.
I've heard that a lot, examples of people getting money, fame, or whatever "success" means in the eyes of this society. But they still feel the void. And I believe them. That is the part I want you to sit with. I am not skeptical anymore. I think they are telling the truth.
But I still want the thing.
I have not reached my goals. Not the dream, not the version of my life where everything finally clicks into place. I am still down here, climbing, wanting it as badly as ever. And I already know, intellectually, that when I get there I will probably feel the same thing they all felt. That the view was not the answer. I know this. And it changes nothing. I want it anyway. So where does the wanting come from?
It comes from a hidden assumption, a fantasy that lives in our heads. That real life has not started yet. That it is always about to begin, after the sports car, after the business that finally works, after we meet the person who fixes everything. So we treat right now as a waiting room, ticket in hand, watching for our number to be called.
So we wait. And while we wait, we postpone the good part, the being happy part, always one more goal away. But here is the thing we get backwards. The happiness was never waiting at the end. It was in the climb.
In The Alchemist, Paulo Coelho writes about a boy who travels across the world chasing a treasure, only to find it was buried back where he started. It sounds like a cruel joke. All that way for nothing. But thinking it was all for nothing is where people get it wrong.
Going all the way around the world to end up home is not the same as never having left. The boy crossed the whole world for the treasure. But the real prize was never the gold. It was what the journey made of him.
I won't pretend you can just decide to feel this. You probably can't stop striving either, some of us are built to chase, and no essay is going to switch that off. But you can choose to loosen your grip on the finish line. You can stop treating today as the waiting room. You can expect problems instead of waiting for the day they end, because that day is not coming, problems are not a bug in the life, they are the life.
You can make peace with the strangest part of all of it. You might have to get the thing just to learn the thing was never the answer. That is not a waste. That is the only way the lesson gets in.
It is unteachable. You will not believe me. That is fine. I did not believe it either. I still don't, not all the way. I am still climbing. But I am trying to enjoy the climb while I can.