Essays on the work

I often ask accomplished people how long a big win actually felt good. Most of them have to think about it. The honest answer is usually shorter than they’d like to admit. A weekend. An afternoon. Sometimes just the drive home.

That isn’t ingratitude, and it doesn’t mean they chose the wrong goal. It’s one of the most predictable things about being human, and it quietly runs the inner lives of a lot of driven people.

The treadmill under the ladder

Psychologists call this hedonic adaptation. In the early 1970s, Philip Brickman and Donald Campbell described a “hedonic treadmill,” our tendency to get used to good fortune and drift back to roughly where we started. A well-known follow-up study found that lottery winners, about a year later, weren’t reliably happier than people who hadn’t won.

The research since then is more nuanced. We don’t adapt to everything, and some changes leave a lasting mark. But the basic finding holds up well enough to take seriously. The thing you were sure would change how you feel usually becomes ordinary faster than you expected.

For most people that’s a passing letdown. For people whose lives are built around the next milestone, it becomes the shape of life itself. The promotion turns into the job. The exit turns into the money. The first book turns into pressure for the second.

When achievement is doing two jobs

So the more useful question isn’t why the good feeling fades. It’s what you were asking the achievement to do.

Ambition can come from real appetite: curiosity, craft, the pleasure of doing something well. It can also be carrying something heavier. Managing anxiety. Earning a sense of worth that never felt automatic. Trying to settle an old question about whether you’re enough. Jennifer Crocker’s research on self-worth suggests that when how we feel about ourselves rides on one area of life, wins there bring a spike and setbacks bring a sharper drop. Neither lasts, so you need the next one.

When achievement is doing that second job, the fading isn’t just disappointing. It’s unsettling. The relief wears off, and the old feeling, the one the win was supposed to quiet, comes back.

Many of the people I see don’t have too much ambition. They have ambition that got drafted into emotional work it was never built for.

The bar keeps moving

In 1954, Leon Festinger observed that we judge ourselves largely by comparison. Success makes this tricky, because every step up brings a new set of peers: people further along, better known, or making it look easier.

So someone who once measured themselves against their college friends now measures themselves against the most visible people in their field. On paper they’ve moved forward. Inside, they’re back in the middle again.

It’s part of why success can feel oddly lonely. Everyone else sees what you’ve done. You see the room you haven’t been invited into yet.

What actually helps

Wanting less isn’t the answer. Ambition isn’t a symptom, and I’m wary of any approach that treats drive as something to cure. The work is to make it more conscious.

A few questions usually help. What did you think this would give you, exactly? How long did that last? What feeling came back when it wore off? If you hit the next goal tomorrow, what would you be hoping it would finally settle?

The answers tend to fall into two piles. Some goals would genuinely make your life better: more freedom, more meaningful work, more time with the people you love. Others mostly add status, or keep a familiar anxiety at bay. Both are human. Only one of them can ever be finished.

None of this means you should stop climbing. It means knowing which parts of the climb are actually yours, and building a life that still feels good on an ordinary Tuesday, when nothing has just been won.

People rarely tell me they feel like a fraud when they’re new at something. They tell me when they’re very good at it. The surgeon with years of excellent outcomes. The founder whose company is finally working. The executive everyone in the room looks to.

That timing is telling. The feeling usually isn’t a misjudgment of ability. It’s a misunderstanding of what ability means.

Where the idea comes from

In 1978, Pauline Clance and Suzanne Imes described what they called the impostor phenomenon in a group of highly accomplished women. Despite degrees, honors, and real recognition, the women believed they weren’t actually smart and had somehow fooled everyone. They credited luck, charm, or sheer effort, and lived with a quiet fear of being found out.

We now know it shows up across genders, professions, and cultures. A 2020 review led by Dena Bravata found it common among high achievers and often tied to anxiety, depression, and burnout. It isn’t a diagnosis. It doesn’t need to be one to cost a lot.

A feeling that can’t lose

What makes it so stubborn is that it can’t lose an argument. Every success gets reinterpreted. If something went well, you were lucky, or you prepared so much that it doesn’t count. If it went badly, that proves the point.

Over time, many people come to believe the anxiety is what keeps them good. If they stopped worrying, they’d slip. So the fear starts to feel useful, and letting it go feels reckless.

It’s closely tied to perfectionism, especially what Paul Hewitt and Gordon Flett called socially prescribed perfectionism: the belief that other people need you to be flawless. If you feel your place depends on never falling short, ordinary human limits start to look like evidence against you.

The self that performs

Seen developmentally, the feeling often makes sense. Donald Winnicott wrote about the false self, a way of being that forms around what a child senses will keep the important people close. It protects something truer underneath.

A lot of high achievers learned early that being impressive was the reliable way to be seen. They got very good at it. The catch is that praise for the performance never quite reaches the person giving it. Some part of them knows the applause is for the role, and wonders what would happen if they stopped playing it.

So the fear isn’t really about competence. It’s about being known. The question underneath is less “Am I good enough?” and more “Would I still be wanted if I weren’t this impressive?”

What helps

Reassurance rarely works. People who feel this way have usually heard plenty of it, and more evidence doesn’t land, because the problem was never a shortage of evidence.

What helps is pulling competence and worth apart, so one stops having to prove the other. It helps to catch the exact moment you discount a success, and to name it while it’s happening. It helps to try doing something well enough instead of perfectly, and then notice what actually follows. Usually it’s much less than you feared.

And it helps to let a few people see you when you’re not performing. Not as a vulnerability exercise, but because being known without the polish is the only experience that can answer the question the polish was built to avoid.

The goal isn’t to feel certain you deserve your success. It’s to stop treating the doubt as a verdict.

When someone disappears without a word, the person left behind usually does two things at once. They grieve, and they investigate. They reread the messages, replay the last conversation, and build theories about what went wrong.

The grief makes sense. The investigation is where people get stuck.

Why silence hurts so much

Ghosting, ending a relationship by simply going quiet, is common enough now that researchers study it on its own terms. Leah LeFebvre’s work describes how it leaves the person on the other end to do all the interpreting alone.

Kipling Williams’s research on ostracism helps explain why that’s so painful. Being ignored threatens some of our most basic needs: to belong, to have some control, to feel that we matter. Work by Naomi Eisenberger and colleagues found that social exclusion activates some of the same brain regions involved in physical pain. When people say being ghosted hurts, they aren’t exaggerating.

The ambiguity adds its own weight. Pauline Boss coined the term ambiguous loss for losses without a clear ending. Without an ending, the mind keeps the file open.

The search for an answer

Most people try to close that file themselves. If they can just figure out why, the pain will stop. So they analyze. Was it something I said? Did they meet someone? Was I too much, or not enough?

Arie Kruglanski’s research on the need for closure shows that under stress, we want a firm answer, almost any firm answer, and we hold on to it. That’s why so many of the explanations people land on are harsh and self-blaming. A painful certainty can feel easier to live with than an open question.

The trouble is that the answer usually isn’t available. Even when it is, it rarely brings the relief people hope for. Someone else’s silence says more about their tolerance for discomfort than about your worth.

Closure is something you build

In my experience, closure is less something you receive and more something you make. It comes from tolerating not knowing long enough that the question stops running your attention.

That’s a skill, and it gets built through repetition. Noticing the urge to check their profile and letting it pass. Writing the message you won’t send. Saying, out loud if it helps, “I may never know why, and I can still move on.”

It’s also worth looking honestly at the pattern, without putting yourself on trial. Was there a familiar feeling in this relationship? An anxious watchfulness, a sense of chasing someone just out of reach? If so, that’s worth understanding. Not because you caused it, but because it may point to the kind of connection you keep finding.

If you’re tempted to ghost

Most people who ghost aren’t cruel. They’re avoiding a conversation that feels unbearable. The kinder and more self-respecting option is usually short and honest: “I’ve really enjoyed getting to know you, and I don’t see this going further. I wanted to tell you directly.”

That message costs you a minute of discomfort. Silence can cost the other person weeks.

Being able to sit with uncomfortable feelings, both the urge to disappear and the ache of being left, is one of the clearer signs of emotional maturity. It’s also what makes real intimacy possible.

Many people come to see me already knowing their pattern. They can describe it precisely. They pick partners who are a little unavailable. They go quiet when they’re hurt, then resent that nobody noticed. They become the capable one in every relationship and wonder why they feel alone.

They understand it. And they keep doing it.

That gap between understanding and change is where most of the real work happens.

Why we repeat

More than a century ago, Freud noticed that people tend to repeat what they haven’t been able to remember or work through. Instead of recalling an old experience, we act it out again in new relationships, usually without realizing it.

Attachment research gives that idea firmer footing. John Bowlby proposed that early relationships shape our expectations about whether others will be there, and whether we’re worth being there for. Cindy Hazan and Phillip Shaver later found that adult romantic relationships tend to follow similar patterns. Those expectations aren’t destiny, but they’re efficient. They tell us what to look for, what to brace against, and what feels like home.

What people often miss is that the familiar doesn’t have to feel good to feel right. A relationship that recreates an old dynamic can come with a strange sense of recognition, even chemistry, precisely because you already know the role.

Why insight alone stalls

Insight changes how you explain your behavior. It doesn’t automatically change the behavior, because the pattern doesn’t live mainly in the part of you that explains things. It lives in reflexes. What your body does when someone pulls away. What comes out of your mouth before you’ve decided to say it.

Paul Wachtel described how these patterns keep themselves going. We act in ways that draw predictable responses from other people, and those responses confirm what we expected. The person who expects to be let down holds back, their partner feels shut out and pulls away, and the old belief gets proven true one more time.

That’s how someone can know their childhood story by heart and still repeat it perfectly. The loop is kept alive in the present, one interaction at a time.

What changes it

Change tends to come from new experience, not new explanation. Franz Alexander called this a corrective emotional experience: going through something familiar and having it end differently than you expected.

In practice, that means catching the pattern earlier and smaller. Not “I always choose unavailable people,” but “Right now, when he didn’t text back, I wanted to pull away first.” In that moment there’s a choice that wasn’t there before. You can say, “I noticed I wanted to shut down. I’d rather tell you it stung.”

The first few times, this will feel awkward, maybe even risky. That’s usually a good sign. Doing the unfamiliar thing and seeing the relationship survive it is what slowly rewrites the expectation underneath.

Therapy can help here, not only as a place to understand the pattern but as a relationship where it’s bound to show up and can be met differently. When the old dynamic appears in the room and gets handled with care instead of repeated, something shifts that explanation alone can’t reach.

Understanding the pattern is where it starts. Interrupting it, in real time and with real people, is the work.