What if your goals in life lead to failure?

Money, food, family, friends, country and more matter zero to me but that one goal was it and I failed. And it’s all I think about day in and day out. The thousands of hours of work weren’t a joy. The thousand of hours of work were a sacrifice only for that goal. The success in life never once mattered. I wrote the goal every day in every notebook. I worked and worked and worked at it forgoing social interactions, health and activities and that’s it.

what if that was specifically the only thing you cared about in your life to the point that if you don’t reach it you really don’t care about living or anything else. I don’t want to learn to “accept and smile” about it. I want to know what plan I should specifically undertake to rationalize the black and white view of fail vs succeed when that was the very only thing I cared about. Money, food, family, friends, country and more matter zero to me but that one goal was it and I failed. And it’s all I think about day in and day out. The thousands of hours of work weren’t a joy. The thousand of hours of work were a sacrifice only for that goal. The success in life never once mattered. I wrote the goal every day in every notebook. I worked and worked and worked at it forgoing social interactions, health and activities and that’s it.

ao if that’s it, how do you get over it without some sort of happiness budda philosophical convention in cognitive distortion. All the books about success talk about the vision and sacrifice of the goal. Most indicate that if you don’t succeed it’s because youdiidjt want it enough.
What then especially if the starting point was that the goal was all that mattered.

To start, I hate cognitive therapy. Really dislike it above all else. I do not like going to a counselor and having them constantly ask me what I think. I have a lot of years of college, therapy and success in life and I’m at a point where I really need help and the therapist asking me what I think something means is absolutely not helping me. Same thing with trying to put on rose colored glasses about events and look at them in a different light.

None of these are my goals;

what if your goal was “win an Olympic gold medal”

“write a best selling novel with over 1 million sales”

“become a senator”

“Become CEO of a fortune 100 company”

“run 100 meters in under 10 seconds”

“become the first person to set foot on mars”

“record a top 40 song”

“sell your company for over 100 million dollars”

“develop a cure for a type of cancer”

Or any other thing

Then you spent every waking moment working only on that goal. No fun, no stepping outside your diet, you sacrificed everything to reach that goal and you failed

How do you cognitively fix the fact that this accomplishment was your only goal. You don’t care about the journey or the things you learned along the way or the parts that made you happy or unhappy. Your only goal live or die was that success or failure. The hallmark was success. Someone else had the same goal and they beat you and succeeded and you failed. That’s it. The time can’t be made up, you are 50 plus years old, you can’t get the time back, you can’t redo it, there isn’t a lesson to be learned and that’s it.

what if that was specifically the only thing you cared about in your life to the point that if you don’t reach it you really don’t care about living or anything else. I don’t want to learn to “accept and smile” about it. I want to know what plan I should specifically undertake to rationalize the black and white view of fail vs succeed when that was the very only thing I cared about. Money, food, family, friends, country and more matter zero to me but that one goal was it and I failed. And it’s all I think about day in and day out. The thousands of hours of work weren’t a joy. The thousand of hours of work were a sacrifice only for that goal. The success in life never once mattered. I wrote the goal every day in every notebook. I worked and worked and worked at it forgoing social interactions, health and activities and that’s it.

ao if that’s it, how do you get over it without some sort of happiness budda philosophical convention in cognitive distortion. All the books about success talk about the vision and sacrifice of the goal. Most indicate that if you don’t succeed it’s because youdiidjt want it enough.
What then especially if the starting point was that the goal was all that mattered.

I jump from “I need to accomplish” to “nothing ever done or that will be done will ever matter and I may as well just give up now”. I wind up saying “will what I do matter in 500 years” and I compare myself to a peasant in someplace like medieval France who lived his life, did nothing of importance and died and whether he was there or not wouldn’t affect anything today 500 years later.

I want to feel good but I can’t help thinking about these things. When I couple that with the way that my businesses and the way I work in consulting and the views of employment as a cost basis for tens of thousands of people it’s easy to just see that nothing matters. I know it’s not right but that’s how I wind up spiraling.

It’s all true but I’ve found it’s hard to just make the change as decades of depression and patterns of self evaluation are always there.

I wind up saying “will what I do matter in 500 years” and I compare myself to a peasant in someplace like medieval France who lived his life, did nothing of importance and died and whether he was there or not wouldn’t affect anything today 500 years later

Those are all easy things to say. It’s much harder to feel good about life and myself in it. I’m sure this will go away for a while and then come back again.

For me it’s the combination of those high achievement goals, achieving some of them and still have so little control over life and realizing that so much of what I do doesn’t matter and won’t matter in the big picture. Then I start thinking “why do I want to matter?” And then I start thinking “why bother existing at all?”

I find that very few things make me happy, I’m constantly playing catch up and wishing I could just let things go and then I start thinking “if I didn’t exist I wouldn’t feel so bad and the people bothering me wouldn’t be able to force me to do things.”

it all comes back to an enormous disappointment about most decisions I’ve made, knowing none of them can be changed, looking at the series of failures and just seeing futility and despair as the future.

I’m not proud of my house or family or life. If I could do it all over I’d prevent myself from being born. I don’t believe in the butterfly flapping its wings view that “you may have smiled at someone and their whole life changed and they changed the world” because that’s the kind of platitude that I immediately calculate the odds of that in the world of the number of people there are and I find it almost nil. As I said with the peasant in France in 1600 or so, yes that peasant could have had a happy and wonderful
Life and we know nothing about them but my brain also says “if that peasant had not existed or took their own life what would have changed for the better or worse today or even 500 years from now?” And to say the reason is that this person peasant could have had impacts no one could see is really grabbing at the same hopeful futility that anyone does with some unknown; maybe it is something that’s a special pleading you can’t understand. That’s true but then you have to have the special pleading that “what if that persons life meant nothing, impacted nothing from start to finish and if they weee miserable and had a terrible time with no joy or accomplishments would it have mattered if they didn’t exist or took their own life or perhaps would thjngs have been much better?

I get up hating what I face every day. And it never stops. Sure I have the occasional cup of coffee that I enjoy. In a large way I’m embarrassed by who I am and where I am and it doesn’t matter to me that the rest of the world looks at my situation with envy. I don’t. What I would specifically like to change is to go back in time and redo many of the things that have brought me here. Not disappoint anyone, not marry an angry ocpd spouse who is a severe hoarder, not agree to things that tie me to work that never ends and has no purpose, above all be more successful in how I work and avoid people who need things from me at all costs.

That’s where my brain goes all the time whether I want it to or not. It’s what I struggle with. I don’t want to sort out how I look at things, I want to go back and fix things.

Sometimes I regret that life is not a computer game where you can load a saved game and start from where you left off...

I do wish I had the benefit of more wisdom much earlier.