When Success is Unfulfilling:
A Yogic Perspective
Written By: Balraj Persaud
Success can be real and still feel unfulfilling because the deeper project was never achievement—it was the fantasy that enough success would finally make us invulnerable. We secretly hope it will make us immune to exposure, inadequacy, or the feeling that something is missing. This piece offers a yogic perspective on why no configuration of the world can do that job, why standard advice fails to reach the source of the problem—and what to do instead.
We find ourselves already living as though our lives have not yet “worked out”. And we call “success” whatever we believe will finally make life work out. And we hope that we will get/do/obtain something that will finally settle the chronic background dis-ease that says something is missing, wrong, or not yet enough.
We are, in other words, seeking a kind of salvation—trying to be saved, permanently, by something in/of the world. Not “saved” in a moral or religious sense, but “saved” in the sense of finally being secure enough, complete enough, resolved enough, that we no longer have to contend with the relentless, background sense that something is missing or wrong in me or my life, and that we no longer feel our existence needs to be resolved or secured or justified/explained. Beneath our efforts to improve, heal, or succeed often lies the desire to finally feel fully and permanently complete—never again be made to feel ashamed or unworthy, defective or incompetent, dependent or exposed, invisible, anxious, unsafe. Beneath the respectable surface goal (“the number,” “the title,” “the house,” “the relationship,” “the recognition”) is often a more desperate objective: then I will finally be done—and never feel compelled to strive for anything ever again.
On The Arrival Fallacy or The Hedonic Treadmill:
The Fantasy of [Existential] Invulnerability
We tend to pursue this “salvation” in two broad ways. Some of us try to add weight to our self-image and our life: money, recognition, status, power, desirability, even “perfect mental health” or “enlightenment.” Here, the fantasy is that enough weight will make us undeniable—too substantial to be erased, ignored, rejected, replaced, or dismissed. (Here we rely precisely on the recognition of others in order to no longer care about the recognition of others.) Others try to shed weight: get rid of what feels defective or burdensome—guilt, trauma, “negative emotions,” weakness, sins, ego, confusion, need. Here, the fantasy here is that if the defects are gone, nothing will be left that can expose us; we become seamless, pure, beyond doubt. The former is experienced primarily as unrelenting desire, the latter as fear/disgust. Either way, the hope is the same: to become unshakable, in control, complete, healed—so we never again feel compelled to strive, defend, manage perception, or explain ourselves. “Success” here is bearing an impossible (and incoherent) weight: beyond improving life, it should make certain forms of exposure, inadequacy, dependence or shame simply no longer possible; it must make us safer from the gaze of others, from circumstances, and from our own inner lives.
To be sure, material success and progress are absolutely possible. But when they’re driven by the need to silence or outrun a feeling—especially feelings that arise from our inherent dependence on forces we cannot control—no success might ever feel like it’s enough. Craving intensifies lack; the stronger desire for money, fame, or status intensifies our awareness of lack, obscurity, or powerlessness. The more desperately we want something to make us feel secure, the more we become hypersensitive to the evidence that we are not secure.
The more we try to avoid shame, the more our attention trains itself to detect shame—how to prevent it, manage it, hide it. But more importantly, this desire for existential invulnerability is the desire to be free of the demands of our contingency, relationality, dependence—conditionality. The quest for invulnerability is, strictly speaking, not running from failure or shame per se, but the underlying exposure of being a self that cannot secure itself once and for all.
This quest for invulnerability is impossible because we are irrevocably embedded in structures of dependence that precede and exceed us—structures that will never allow us to exist beyond conditions. In other words, the very conditions that make the us possible (as someone reading and understanding this)—embodiment, relationships, time, culture, language, other people, uncertainty—are the very conditions that make invulnerability impossible. (And this includes emotions and our own inner life; even if the outer world cooperates, our inner life still isn’t fully subject to our will—thoughts, feelings, impulses, and old fears can have a life of their own). In yet other words, you cannot have a life that is both awake to what matters and immune to being affected by it.
This is also why failure can feel disproportionate. Sometimes what’s more troubling than the actual failure is what the failure represents or activates in us—perhaps incompetence, unworthiness, replaceability—some of the very feelings we were relying on success to protect us from. We’re not just reacting to what happened; we react to what it produced in us. The same is true for our success that feels hollow—what haunts us is the feeling that wasn’t destroyed by our success; what haunts us is what the outcome failed to secure. Sometimes, when striving begins to loosen, what first appears is not relief but sorrow (for what achievement could never secure).
As such, it can help to ask a different question than “What do I want?” Instead, consider asking what do I believe having [whatever form of “success” I crave] will finally give me or finally silence? What feeling do I think success will protect me from ever having again? Shame, unworthiness, inadequacy, exposure, dependence, anxiety, unsafe-ness, invisibility—being forgotten, exposed as overestimated, being admired but never loved? And what do I think it will make it impossible for other people to do to me (ignore me, reject me, replace me, misunderstand me), or make it impossible for my own inner life to do to me (haunt me, betray me, undo me)?
It can help to ask a different question than “What do I want?” Instead, consider asking what do I believe having [whatever form of “success” I crave] will finally give me or finally silence? What feeling do I think success will protect me from ever having again—shame, unworthiness, inadequacy, exposure, dependence, anxiety, unsafe-ness, invisibility? And what do I think it will make it impossible for other people to do to me (ignore me, reject me, replace me, misunderstand me), or impossible for my own inner life to do to me (haunt me, betray me, undo me)?
Avoiding Discomfort and The Pursuit of Happiness
In daily life, we have endless ways to keep attention occupied—work, planning, scrolling, shopping, self-improvement—so we don’t have to think the thoughts or feel the feelings we don’t want to feel. And the more we run from discomfort, the more [avoiding] discomfort determines our life: avoidance shapes what we attempt, what we postpone, what we interpret as risky, what we tell ourselves is “realistic”.
Craving and avoidance can also recruit “good things” into the same loop—productivity, healing, spirituality—if they’re pursued as a way to finally become beyond discomfort. We can even turn “accepting vulnerability” into an identity—another way to defend/perfect ourselves. We start performing honesty, performing detachment, performing depth; “I’ve accepted this” becomes a new strategy for never again having to feel the very thing we claim to have accepted.
Of course, not all avoidance is unskillful. Sometimes stepping away is discernment, wisdom, or survival. The problem is not avoidance itself, but the unexamined, conditioned fleeing that makes our lives narrower and more reactive. And, to be sure, the pursuit of survival, dignity, or fair conditions is not the pursuit of invulnerability. Rather, the pursuit of invulnerability is the demand that success (or healing) will make us permanently immune to all forms of discomfort.
This is why success is so easy to keep chasing: it’s simpler to stay occupied than to sit with whatever our occupation is helping us outrun. And this is why “progress” can become compulsive—turning everything into a project: optimize, refine, rebrand, upgrade, execute—so that we don’t have to feel what’s underneath the project. It is also why this kind of striving so frequently leads to burnout: exhaustion is the inevitable result of asking our careers to perform the impossible job of permanently securing our existence. If we deem avoidance to be the problem, turning avoidance into an enemy and “avoidance hunting” into a new compulsive project of self-improvement. Even spirituality can be weaponized against ourselves—pursuing yoga, inner peace, or enlightenment as a result/outcome (as invulnerability/perfection) rather than as a practice of no longer fleeing ourselves.
In yoga, the desire to fix ourselves may actually reinforce the very self from which we are seeking freedom. Yoga is not the destruction of vulnerability. Yoga is what remains once we abandon striving for whatever we think will destroy our vulnerabilities and secure our self-existence. Yoga—the path of self-awareness—is not intended to fix the self, but to help us become aware of the patterns that make us feel incomplete in the first place.
Beyond Balance, Burnout, and Mindset/Reframing:
Yoga and the (Affective) Impulse to Self-Transcend
The problem is not simply that successful but unfulfilled people hold the “wrong” beliefs about success. Standard advice tries to change the mind; it offers a new story, a new priority, a new belief, or a call for some form of “balance”. (Better advice encourages behaviours that require the cultivation of more presence and less self-absorption.) The problem is that their experience is already organized by a felt demand—as an automatic, pre-reflective reflex—for life to make them secure, complete, or beyond reproach. The contemplative/yogic approach does not primarily offer new contents; rather, it works by developing the capacity to catch the affective reflex in the act; it encourages the cultivation of the ability to recognize impulses before they determine thinking, feeling, behaving, and perceiving. In this view, the problem of unfulfillment is not a problem to be solved but a pattern to be recognized. The inner monologue is not the target of our inquiry; rather, we target the underlying, affective reflex that produces the monologue.
In this way, we won’t simply select a new method from inside our existing reflexes—the very reflexes that produced our experience of unfulfillment to begin with. A person wired for outward action—someone driven by optimization, systems, and execution—will read advice about fulfillment as a call to better manage their life by adopting stricter routines, searching for the perfect strategy/framework, attempting to master “work-life balance”, and so on. Conversely, someone drawn to introspection and healing will read the same advice as a call to go deeper inward—to journal more, find/process more trauma, definitively “fix” their psychology or nervous system, and so on.
In both cases, their perception was already shaped by the very tendencies that awareness is asking us to see. Both individuals are acting on the exact same impulse: the desperate need to do something to escape discomfort and secure themselves. Yoga doesn’t want you to fix the pattern; it wants you to see the part of you that is trying to fix. It doesn’t want you to escape outward into more action, or inward into more self-analysis. Rather, it asks for the cultivation of a kind of receptivity—the willingness to simply witness the impulse to escape. And the moment you see it—just like the moment you realize you’re daydreaming, you’re no longer daydreaming—you’re no longer trapped by it. You’ve become aware of it, and are no longer possessed by it. This is what gives you choice—a moment to intervene in instinctive pursuit/recoil (even if we ultimately decide that our instinct was correct). To be sure, the goal of this awareness is not to extinguish ambition or to force ourselves to arbitrarily “not want more”, but is, rather, to enable conscious/creative building, striving, and achieving—and not a reactive, compulsive attempt to outrun your own vulnerability.
What yoga wants is not a satisfying [intellectual] account of why the seeking doesn’t work—not least because this account can itself become another form of occupation, another way to feel resolved. What yoga wants is direct recognition: catching the reflex in the act—noticing the moment the mind reaches for control, for occupation, for the next thing that will finally settle its restlessness, if only because even when we know that success won’t grant us salvation, we still strive as if it will, because the demand for invulnerability is an affective reflex, a direct response to the fact that, as irrevocably dependent, contingent, and relational beings, our security is always in question. And, to be sure, the result of this direct recognition of our impulses produces a different relationship with experience—one that doesn’t require the restlessness to stop in order to remain present with it. And as a different relationship to experience, it is a different experience. How you relate to your experience is your experience.
But even this—self-awareness—is not a new guarantee; it doesn’t make us invincible, and it doesn’t end uncertainty. It just keeps us from being ruled by what we haven’t yet seen—particularly any incarnation of the desire for invulnerability—and this process is not always peaceful.
It is worth noting this same structure may appear outside of achievement contexts as well; it is often what leads us to build the “wrong” life or carry misaligned values—we end up pursuing what feels safe and securing, rather than what is genuinely meaningful. Sometimes it is not only success that is recruited to protect us from vulnerability, dependence, rejection, or inner disturbance—but also intimacy, desire, control, or even the kind of life we allow ourselves to want.
The problem is not simply that successful but unfulfilled people hold the “wrong” beliefs about success. It is that their experience is already organized by a felt demand—an automatic, pre-reflective reflex—for life to make them secure, complete, or beyond reproach (...) perception is already shaped by the very tendencies that awareness is asking us to see. Both individuals are acting on the exact same impulse: the desperate need to do something to escape discomfort and secure themselves. Yoga doesn’t want you to fix the pattern; it wants you to see the part of you that is trying to fix.
About the Author
In his private work, Balraj helps senior leaders and professionals strengthen their composure and presence under pressure (so scrutiny/crisis don’t compromise their judgement, relationships, or legacy). Balraj retains limited capacity for Private Spiritual Advisory, which is intended for those senior leaders and professionals who feel that they should be fulfilled, but aren’t—and don’t what to do about it. Despite professional success, a sense of hollowness persists—not because of what’s missing externally, but because the mind keeps deferring resolution to the next achievement (and perhaps can no longer find the next one exciting enough to not be weighed down by the emptiness). This is a separate track for leaders ready to integrate professional success with contemplative inquiry and deeper exploration. This is practice-based coaching/advisory for already-functional people; it is not psychotherapy, treatment, or ‘healing’ work. To speak directly with Balraj about your situation, please request a consultation.