This is a false belief I’ve also struggled with for most of my life. For me it’s always been in the form of “Once I achieve X” or “As soon as X happens” or “After I’ve solved X” (insert algebra joke here), or “After I get past X” etc everything will be sunshine and roses.
But it never is.
Because the reality of life is, there are always more things to overcome.
No matter how many times I think about it and recognize that trap, I still fall into it. Some part of my brain still believes, naively, that at any given moment there exists some singular obstacle that, once overcome, will result in everything magically falling into place.
When I was younger and single, the “mountain” was finding the right girl. Then another time it was getting to a particular goal weight/fitness level. Other times it’s getting a particular contract or business deal signed. And yes, to be fair, meeting the right girl did solve my insecurities about being forever alone (I was actually only single for a few months before meeting the girl who I later married, but at the time the previous relationship had crashed and burned badly enough to leave me in a deep, dark hole for a while… but I had company down there, and it’s name was vodka. But, I digress… lol), but that was it… it didn’t translate over to everything else in my life like magic.
I keep having to remind myself that I’ve solved nearly all of the problems past me ever faced, in one way or the other, but guess what… present me still has issues come up, and future me will too. That’s just life.
It’s summed up beautifully in a Haitian proverb: “Beyond mountains there are mountains.” I’d originally heard it as “After mountain, more mountains” but I looked up the original translation to quote here.
