Why achieving your goals can leave you feeling so empty

Source: The Conversation – USA (2)

When Anne Carson learned she had won the Nobel Prize in literature, she was in Iceland, where, according to the Swedish Academy, she was “listening to the wind.”

Carson didn’t answer her phone right away, silencing it until her husband persuaded her to call back. Her verdict on the academy’s choice: “I think you’re all insane.”

Whatever she felt in the moment, there is an irony in Carson’s Nobel win. The highest award in literature has gone to a writer who has spent her career exploring the emptiness of a desire fulfilled.

The honor coincides with the 40th anniversary of the publication of her first book, “Eros the Bittersweet,” a meditation on desire.

In it, Carson argues that desire begins with a void – with wanting what we don’t have. She traces how this feeling of absence shapes love, reading, writing and thinking, activities that renew themselves precisely because they are never complete.

The philosopher and the top

“Eros” begins with a brief preface on Franz Kafka’s “The Top,” a story about a philosopher who spends his time around children so he can chase their spinning tops. When a child sets a top in motion, the philosopher snatches it, believing that understanding any small thing, even a spinning top, would be enough to understand everything.

While the top spins, the philosopher is filled with hope, but as soon as he grasps it, he is repelled by the dumb piece of wood. He throws it down and waits for the next child to spin a top.

For Carson, the story is about why people love to fall in love. The philosopher is after what Carson calls an “impertinent stability in vertigo,” a state that is “itself delightful, a suspended moment of living hope.” The philosopher’s quest for knowledge, Carson cheekily concludes, is simply his pretext for chasing spinning tops. He is enchanted by the spinning itself, and even by his own enchantment – a spell that breaks the instant the top stops in his hand.

Most people know a version of this: There is something animating about chasing a goal. But once attained, the framed degree fades into the wall, the promotion quickly loses its luster, and the plaque becomes another dumb piece of wood.

The delight of wanting disappears in the having.

A hole in the self

Why does fulfillment so often feel like loss?

Carson’s answer begins with the Greek word for erotic love, “eros,” which she explains denotes want or lack. Plato’s Socrates makes the same point in the “Symposium.” For the Greeks, no one desires what they already have.

Desire also opens up an absence. To long for someone or something is to discover our own edges, the chasm where the self ends and what is wanted begins. Eros reveals that we are incomplete – an awareness that causes the self to become undone, loosening at the joints.

In one of her poems, the Greek poet Sappho called this experience “glukupikron,” or “sweetbitter.”

Carson’s translation of the passage reads: “Eros once again limb-loosener whirls me / sweetbitter, impossible to fight off, creature stealing up.”

Sappho puts sweet first, Carson notes in “Eros,” but desire is not initially sweet and then bitter. Pleasure and pain arrive together, in the same body and at the same time, before the lover is even able to distinguish them.

Carson extends this pattern to reading, writing and thinking. A reader approaches a text’s meaning but never masters it; every rereading turns up new meanings. The pleasure of understanding and the ache of incompleteness arrive together.

Writing works the same way. A good sentence both captures and conceals what the writer means. Thinking also runs on that doubled feeling, which is how the story of a philosopher chasing tops ended up in a book about love.

The trouble with goals

The same bittersweet pattern also shows up somewhere far less romantic: at work. Meeting a deadline brings relief that is already hollow because the next one is waiting.

I discovered “Eros the Bittersweet” as a philosophy graduate student, when my goals were to read, write and think my way into questions I loved. Now I spend much of my day as a university administrator, where the quality of my work is measured in metrics and met deadlines. Somewhere along the way, my goals stopped being things I wanted and became things to check off.

Today’s productivity culture chases tops of its own, but it looks less like Kafka’s philosopher than like Lucy and Ethel working at the chocolate factory in the 1952 “I Love Lucy” episode “Job Switching.” As the conveyor belt speeds up, the only way they can look like they’re keeping up is to stuff what they’ve missed into their mouths.

Few things capture this pressure more than the SMART goal. In 1981, management consultant George Doran proposed that goals be SMART: specific, measurable, assignable, realistic and time-related. The acronym spread through industries and disciplines as a model for strategic planning, project management, performance evaluations and personal goal-setting. It distills a wider creed: Set the target, sprint after it, hit it. Grasp the top, toss it, capture the next one, ad infinitum. Doran didn’t invent the impulse, but his acronym gave it a checklist.

Carson’s account of desire helps explain why this creed leads to two kinds of emptiness.

The first comes from pursuing goals people never really desired. Inbox zero and a quarterly metric are goals in service of goals, the ultimate of which is productivity itself, which often simply ends up boosting someone else’s productivity.

The second comes from goals people truly wanted. Psychologist Tal Ben-Shahar calls the letdown that follows the “arrival fallacy” – the belief that reaching a destination will bring lasting happiness.

The Greeks offer another kind of striving, one that locates pleasure in the pursuit itself rather than in the prize. In Plato’s “Phaedrus,” Socrates describes eros as giving the soul wings and treats philosophy as a love of wisdom no one can own.

Centuries later, philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre distinguished external goods, such as money and status, from goods internal to a practice, such as a farmer’s growing mastery of her land or an architect’s pursuit of elegant, functional design. MacIntyre’s example, in his 1981 book “After Virtue,” is a child paid in candy to learn chess. As long as she plays for the candy, she has every reason to cheat. Only when she comes to love the game does she gain what chess itself can give: a particular kind of analytical skill, strategic imagination and competitive intensity.

To Socrates, MacIntyre and Carson, external goods get used up as they are won. Internal goods deepen the longer we pursue them.

Keeping desire alive means choosing pursuits that can never be finished – a craft, a field of study, a relationship – and letting the gap between reaching and grasping stay open. In this way, the lack that can hollow us out can also be what moves us.

Carson was handed the highest prize in literature. Yet the picture the Swedish Academy left us with is of a writer standing in the Icelandic wind, attending to a force of nature that no one can catch.

Stacy Keltner does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/10/30/why-achieving-your-goals-can-leave-you-feeling-so-empty/