When Success is Unfulfilling: A Yogic Perspective

We want our lives to work 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 our existence no longer needs to be secured, defended, or explained. 

In other words, beneath our efforts to improve, heal, or succeed often lies the desire for invulnerability: the fantasy that we’ll 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.

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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. 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. 

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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. 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.

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.

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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.​​​

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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.

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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.​ 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.

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​​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.​ (And even this—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.)