I’ve lived most of my life believing I was an incomplete puzzle. The problem was that the final piece was always changing. Always evolving. Every time I thought I had found it, it changed shape, sometimes disappearing altogether.
At first, it was a car. If only I had four wheels and a full tank of gas. I can roll the windows down, drive the coastline with Santana blaring in the background, watch the sunset, and meet a stranger around a bonfire. Happiness felt simple then.
Soon, money became the missing piece. If I could just have more, I could truly live the life I desired. Of course, that meant finding my dream job because, as the saying goes, you must do what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life.
The trouble was, what I loved wasn’t one thing. I loved writing. Photography. Design. Psychology. Conversations that lasted until midnight. The convergence of ideas, art, and people. I didn’t know what to call it, but no job description seemed to fit the bill. So, I settled for the average job and many more after. Each one looked promising. Each one felt, for a moment, like it might be the missing piece. Except none of them fit quite right.
Then I convinced myself it must be my environment. If I only had my dream apartment, one that looked just like my Pinterest board, surely I’d feel at home in my own life. A place I can have my slow mornings, drink my matcha in a cute Etsy mug, and have fresh flowers and scented candles. Then, just maybe, it will all fall into place.
Eventually, I had that apartment. Yes, it brought me peace, but it wasn’t the final piece. I still carried a feeling of unfulfillment. Incompleteness.
Perhaps it was a friendship? Or maybe a husband? A better career? At some point, I got a cat. She fit my life perfectly, but she wasn’t the missing piece.
Looking back, I realized my life had become an endless cycle of attainment. If I just had (fill in the blank), then I’d be happy. Then I’d be fulfilled. Then I’d finally feel whole.
Mark Manson once said:
“The desire for more positive experience is itself a negative experience. And, paradoxically, the acceptance of one’s negative experience is itself a positive experience.”
This unfortunately described the paradox that became my life. After moving countries, changing careers, building relationships, and starting over several times, fulfillment always remained just beyond the next milestone. The pursuit itself had quietly become proof of the belief beneath it all: that I was incomplete. Every achievement only revealed that there was still a missing piece.
The awakening wasn’t finding the final puzzle piece. It was realizing nothing was missing. Not the car. Not the apartment. Not the career. Not the relationship.
Those things can absolutely enrich a life. They can make it fuller, more joyful, more beautiful. But they are temporary experiences and achievements. And they certainly cannot complete a person who is always chasing the next big thing. Hunter S. Thompson once warned us of this. He quoted:
“Beware of looking for goals: look for a way of life. Decide how you want to live and then see what you can do to make a living WITHIN that way of life.”
To anyone also struggling to get out of the perpetual goal-achieving cycle, I highly encourage you to read Hunter S. Thompson’s letter to his friend Hume Logan when asked for life advice.
His letter changed how I think about my desires. Goals have finish lines. A way of life doesn’t. Goals are achieved and replaced. A way of life grows with you. So long as we keep measuring our lives through goals, we stay trapped in a sense of incompleteness. Every goal carries a level of conformity, rather than accepting yourself as you are. It’s the belief that we’re incomplete until something is achieved.
Instead, Thompson advises:
“We must make the goal conform to the individual, rather than make the individual conform to the goal.”
As life goes on, our experiences change, and so do we. We are ever-changing. Ever-evolving. So chasing fixed goals is chasing a moving target, because we ourselves keep moving.
This is not to say you should never have goals. It’s an argument against what we ask goals to do for us. To give anything or anyone the job of being the last puzzle piece is too heavy a burden to bear. We can still want things, work toward them, even pursue them adamantly. That drive is part of being alive. What we shouldn’t do is measure ourselves against them, believing that we are either falling short or have yet to arrive.
What I mean to say is that true fulfillment is never waiting behind the next achievement. There is nothing to achieve, nothing to attain that can truly make us happier. It’s embedded in the ordinary moments we keep rushing past while chasing the next one. The morning coffee at sunrise. Wine over a late conversation with a friend. The rush of adrenaline from your morning run.
Perhaps life is not a puzzle waiting to be completed. Perhaps the puzzle is simply the present moment, and the final piece is you and your mindset. It’s finding the joy in the most mundane things. Romanticizing a cup of coffee poured in an old, chipped mug. Admiring the colors on your daily commute to work. It simply falls in love with the day, not some future benchmark. Whether it’s a state of fulfillment or lack, it’s your piece to have and to hold. You are the completed puzzle. It’s your wholeness, loved and accepted exactly as you are, exactly where you are.
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