Why You Always Want More

You hit the goal and the goal moves. A look at the machinery underneath the chase.

You hit the goal. The goal moves. You hit the new one. It moves again.

I’ve watched this carousel run my whole life, in business, in relationships, in sport, in politics, in church pews and comment sections. Everybody riding, almost nobody enjoying the ride, all of us quietly convinced the next lap will feel different.

The engine under it all is one word. More.

Be more. Do more. Get more. Make more. Win more. Score more. Learn more. Train more. Explore more. Be seen by more people, accepted by more people, invited to more things. The math runs on a single assumption we never check: if something is good, more of it must be better.

You know the moves.

You finally take the dream trip. Somewhere over the ocean on the flight home, you’re already planning the next one, because this one, it turns out, wasn’t quite it.

You buy your first condo. The ink’s barely dry and you’re browsing listings for something bigger.

You get the promotion. Within a couple of months the new salary feels like the old salary, and the number you “need” has quietly grown to match it.

Or the Instagram version. 50,000 followers was the dream, right up until the day you crossed it. Now the number that will finally do it is 500,000.

Here’s what gets me about this force. It’s invisible, and it’s strong. Walls higher and bars thicker than Leavenworth, and we walk around inside them fully convinced we’re free. Convinced, actually, that the chasing IS freedom. That’s the trick of it. The prison talks you into believing the sentence is your own dream.

The Buddhists have an old image for this. During my years of practice at the Santa Monica Zen Center (almost 7 of them), I learned about hungry ghosts: beings with enormous empty bellies and throats as thin as a needle. They can eat forever and never feel full. The old texts placed them in some other world. To me it reads like a description of an ordinary Tuesday in this culture.

And I’m nobody’s mountaintop lecturer here. I built my life on more. I grew CrossFit LA, one of the first CrossFit gyms in the world, from 8 members to over 350. Then I co-created the Whole Life Challenge, an online health program built from scratch that reached more than 250,000 people and hit $3 million a year at its peak. And at the peak, what I mostly felt was the pull of the next number. Every finish line I crossed dissolved behind me: the car, the house, the business milestone, the race medal, the trip. Each one forgotten almost the moment I had it, my eyes already fixed on the next horizon.

So should you quit setting goals? Stop trying to grow, earn, build, improve?

My honest answer is yes and no.

Wanting things is wonderful. I still want plenty. The trouble lives underneath the wanting, in the medium you’re wanting from.

If your baseline experience of yourself is lack (a quiet, constant hum of insecurity, of scarcity, of being somehow behind), then every goal becomes an escape attempt. And an escape attempt from a feeling can only work for a little while. You hit the target, you feel good for a weekend, and then the old medium reasserts itself, because accumulation was never able to touch it. You were trying to fix a feeling of scarcity by adding things to a life that already had plenty in it, and the feeling stayed put while the pile grew. The cycle resets. Off you go again, a hungry ghost with a bigger house.

What I’ve found actually shifts it is slower and less glamorous.

Start by catching the cycle while it’s running. See the reach happening in real time: the next trip half-planned before this one ends, the bigger number already loaded.

Become a witness to your own life. Watch your triggers, your judgments, your grabbing, the way you’d watch weather. Interested, and a little amused.

Then do the strange, unfamiliar work of building enoughness as a frequency inside you. A felt state you practice, the way you’d practice anything.

Accept where you are, as it is. Including the parts you’re itching to fix.

And let peace with the present come first, before the vision, before the plan. Goals set from that ground feel completely different in your hands. They become a game you get to play, with nothing riding on the outcome but the fun of playing it.

Simple to describe. Genuinely hard to do. Doable, though. I’ve spent 30 years working at it, through a spiritual teacher, a zendo, a master’s degree in spiritual psychology, and a lot of ordinary mornings, and I can tell you the ground does shift.

I also think it matters past any one of us. A culture full of hungry ghosts behaves like one, and every person who learns to feel full changes the room they’re standing in.

You can do this. I believe in you.

With love, Andy

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