Why You Can Succeed and Still Feel That Something Essential Is Missing

Laurentzi de Sasia
Apr 10
7 min read

Updated: 7 days ago

There is a phenomenon, existentially rather complex, that presents itself as a puzzling paradox. It is the failure of the successful person, of someone who reaches what they worked towards for years and, on reaching it, does not find the fulfilment they had assumed would come with it. The position, the recognition, the security, everything is in place, and yet the sense persists that something essential has not been touched by any of those achievements.

The usual response is to treat this state as a flaw in the person, an inability to enjoy what has been won, to enjoy the goal. And yet that feeling is very often an accurate perception of something much deeper. It reveals not a problem in the subject but a confusion we nearly all share, the confusion between three concepts that are worth separating with real care. Success, fulfilment, and meaning.

Success and What It Promises

Success is a relation between a proposed end and an obtained result. One succeeds with respect to a goal that is fixed in advance and then either reached or not, and this gives it a peculiar structure, it is always terminal. A goal is chosen, which is to say controlled as a goal, and then comes the pursuit of it, which is also, supposedly, largely within our control.

The curious thing about a goal is that its very nature is to cancel itself out, because once it is reached it stops working as something to reach or work on. This forces us, in the same movement, to look for the next objective, another goal, which inherits the weight of expectation, or the emptiness, that the previous goal failed to settle. Success, that is, the satisfactory reaching of goals, cannot by its structure deliver lasting fulfilment, because its satisfaction is always tied to a particular objective that, once met, is spent. Its insatiability is not a psychological trait of ambitious people, it is a property of success itself, which is based on a lack-there-off.

What Fulfilment Is and Why It Cannot Be Actively Pursued

Fulfilment is another matter, and confusing it with success is the first mistake. If success is defined in relation to an external goal, fulfilment is a way of being in one’s own life, a quality of the way one lives rather than an achievement within it. One is not fulfilled in the same way one experiences success in an exam or in a business deal.

Viktor Frankl black and white — *Viktor Frankl*

Here a point made by Viktor Frankl, the Viennese psychiatrist who founded logotherapy, applies with precision. Fulfilment, or happiness, if we want to call it that, belongs to that peculiar class of states that can only be reached when they are not sought directly. They are not ends or goals that one can set out to reach and, as such, try to succeed at. Fulfilment, or happiness, follows from living connected to values, and the moment we turn that state into a goal, we lose it.

The connection to values happens when we let go of control, of the hyperfocus on the result, on the success of the goal, and simply let the connection occur without steering it. Only when the connection to the value happens freely, without forcing it, without trying to bring it about through the logic of success, does meaning appear. The experience of meaning is precisely the correlate of that free connection to a value.

Meaning appears when there is a connection to something that is valuable to us, and that connection does not depend on the failure or success of a goal. It is simply the way we relate to what is genuinely valuable to us.

Genuine means that it does not answer to any need or demand, such as having to be productive. At the same time, a genuine value is not chosen but discovered, it is what touches us even before we begin to think or choose. It reaches us without us choosing it rationally. It comes from the spiritual unconscious Frankl would su

ggest. This is genuine liking and it beyond our control to choose it. And because it is not chosen, it often fails to meet the (pseudo)rational standards that rule our age, the ones that seek to justify everything we do by criteria of productivity and achievement.

Logotherapy chart. Framework Success vs Meaning (fulfillment). 4 Quadrants

To make this clearer, Frankl proposed plotting our existence on two perpendicular axes,

one running from success to failure and another running from fulfilment to despair. Since these are independent concepts, four combinations are possible. There can be despair at the summit of success, and there can be fulfilment in failure. It is worth being exact here, so as not to lapse into the rhetoric of adversity. This is not about seeking suffering or granting it value in itself, since avoidable pain, or avoidable failure, should be avoided. The claim is at once narrower and stronger. Not even the unavoidable suffering that follows from failure, or from other sources, is enough to close off every possibility of meaning.

A Confusion of the Age

If this confusion is so widespread today, it is because there are reasons in our age that feed it. Our culture is extraordinarily competent along the axis of success and curiously blind to the dimension of meaning and fulfilment. Nearly the whole of human existence has been turned into a variant of achievement, including leisure and rest, which are managed as projects meant to reach some further objective. Even rest has to account for itself, leisure has to help us develop something that makes us more successful. So much so that everyday language has now lost the vocabulary for speaking of what does not have the shape of achievement. And where it does survive, it is thoroughly looked down upon.

The contemporary philosopher Byung-Chul Han has described with precision a feature of this age that explains why the person trapped on the axis of success cannot simply stop to consider the axis of fulfillment. In earlier times the demands of life came from outside, first from what our survival required in the face of nature and its pressures, and then from an external authority that commanded and forbade. Today the demand has become internal. The individual no longer has to obey an external master who makes demands of us, but has become master and slave of himself, the entrepreneur of his own life, driving himself to perform without rest while believing himself free precisely as he does so. Exploiter and exploited have become the same person, and this is why self-imposed demand is harder to resist than any older coercion, because there is no longer any tyrant to confront: we need to confront ourselves, which involves the way in which we think about our lives.

The successful but existentially void person is not simply tired of working, they are exhausted from driving themselves, from chasing themselves from goal to goal with no permission to stop and experience meaning. That boundless positivity does not issue in fulfilment but in exhaustion and in existential emptiness. More success does not cure the emptiness that success leaves behind, because emptiness is the counterpart of fulfilment, not of success. Self-imposed demand operates entirely within the failure-success axis, and the more it intensifies, the further off the other axis remains. The axis of fulfilment is not reached by tightening but by loosening, by leaving room for what is valuable in our lives to show itself.

To Stop Performance

If fulfilment and meaning cannot be pursued directly, then any advice shaped like a new goal falls back into the very error that produced the problem. The spontaneous response to the emptiness that follows success is usually to set a more ambitious objective, in the hope that this time satisfaction will arrive and stay. But if the emptiness came from having confused the axes, more speed along the axis of success brings us not one step closer to the other. What is needed is not to run harder but to stop and distinguish, between what one pursues because one believes one ought to and what genuinely calls for one’s devotion. To make the difference between life as a sum of achievements and life as a way of being oriented towards values that lie in the world and in others and are not a matter of achievement. Towards values that are not goals, that are not attained or reached, but simply experienced and enjoyed.

These values appear, precisely, when they are no longer thought of as objectives, as something to be attained or controlled. They appear when one lets whatever life has to offer simply show itself. As when we go to a concert and simply listen to the music and let it happen. We do not try to understand it, or photograph it, or memorise it to recount it later. We simply let the phenomenon of the music manifest itself. If it captivates and envelops us, if it gives us meaning for as long as it lasts, if it draws us out of our habitual mode of performance, then we can know that behind it there is a connection to a value. This also happens in conversations with people, when playing for the sake of having fun, in walking, in being out in nature. When control is given up, the mode of being in which everything has to perform disappears, the connection with the underlying value can happen and, thus, we find meaning. Meaning appears when the connection to the value is made, but one must not be forever searching for that connection and forcing it. At some point one must simply make the initial connection (e.g. go to the concert, start the conversation), let it be and not get in the way. We release control, stop relating to it as a goal or as something to be attained.

These conceptual distinctions are hard to sustain, because they run against nearly everything the age repeats, and they are thought through better in calm and, often, in company. Success answers the question of how much we have achieved. Neither fulfilment nor meaning answers that question, because they are not things one achieves, but depend on what a life is turned towards, on which values we allow to show themselves so that they may give us meaning. Without control, without accounting to anyone, not even to ourselves, another type of connection happens. By letting go we obtain meaning and fulfilment, that is the paradox. There can be no direct pursuit of meaning or fulfillment. We cannot control it. All we can do is find out what we genuinely value and generate a free connection with it by letting go of our expectations.

If these questions resonate with you, my work in philosophical counselling and existential analysis offers a space for dialogue, a place to think about how you are living and what life you want to live. If you would like to take that step, do write to me.

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If these questions resonate with you, my work in philosophical counseling and existential analysis offers a space for dialogue to think through how you are living and what life you want to build. If you would like to take that step, I invite you to get in touch.