“We are always getting ready to live but never living.”
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
The great human fiction
Arrival is the great human fiction. You are arriving all the time, but every arrival dissolves the moment you reach it. So you move from arrival to arrival expecting pause or fulfillment at each, but end up always in motion, both always and never arriving.
Is fulfillment a fixed point in time that’s possible to arrive at? What you long for is not a destination but a state of being.
You do not step into the future—it arrives, wave after wave, regardless of your readiness. What you call “arrival” is merely noticing that time has carried you somewhere slightly new.
“The horizon will always recede. This is the nature of horizons.”
- Viktor Frankl
This is called the arrival fallacy — the mistaken belief that once you achieve a goal, you’ll be happy. People who reach their long-pursued goals often experience a momentary high, followed by an unsettling emptiness (Ben-Shahar). This is why lottery winners return to baseline happiness and why retirees feel adrift.
The new job, the perfect relationship, the dream apartment — none of them produce the enduring satisfaction you imagined. Instead, you recalibrate constantly, shift the goalpost, and convince yourself that true arrival is a couple more steps beyond.
The escalator to nowhere
The illusion of arriving isn’t just psychological, but deeply cultural. Career ladders stretch endlessly, social media turns milestones into fleeting currency. There’s always a next step to relationships — dating, engagement, marriage, kids, then what? A golden retriever, a bigger house. The American dream expands and expands and expands to infinity, on an escalator to nowhere.
It conditions you to live in a perpetual state of dissatisfaction. Instead of enjoying the view, you obsess over the next peak.
“We thought of life by analogy with a journey… with a serious purpose at the end. But we missed the point the whole way along. It was a musical thing, and you were supposed to sing or dance while the music was being played.”
- Alan Watts
The "when I get there" delusion. “When I get promoted, when I move to a new city.” You link happiness to externalities, ignoring that your internal state travels with you. Hedonic adaptation is designed to recalibrate your set point, even after major life changes (Jeffries). This is why people who dream of early retirement get restless and crave the structure they sought to escape.
The identity mirage. You chase title and achievement, thinking it will solidify you. The best lives aren’t built on finality but on fluidity; not what you do, but who you are. You are not a noun, you are a verb.
Fearing the void. If arrival is an illusion, what happens when you stop chasing it? There’s inherent comfort in striving for something you know is ungettable, you avoid confronting a lack of motion. But within stillness, you may find moments where you feel truly content. In-between moments. A late-night conversation, a long walk, a deep breath in the morning sun.
You will never be more “arrived” than you are right now. If the past is irretrievable and the future is uncertain, then the only place you can truly inhabit is this very moment. Arrival, then, is not an event but an act of attention.
If you let go of the illusion of arrival, you see clearly the only reality that ever was: that you are already here.
Like Sisyphus. Whenever you get there, the boulder rolls back down.