If You Strive Too Hard For Something That Won’t Come

If you pause for a moment and think, you may see that there are many situations in your life in which you want something with all your might and therefore make an enormous effort to achieve it, but you are unsuccessful. It seems that it is escaping you because you strive too hard for it. Very often, however, when you stop pursuing this goal with such intensity, the opportunity suddenly opens up for you to make it a reality.

If you strive too hard for something to happen or for something to come to you, you are already entering a state of restlessness and a certain dissatisfaction. Hours drag on like days and days like weeks. You are trying to use all the patience you have available, but you cannot get this something that you are dreaming of out of your head. Sometimes it is a person, sometimes a job or money, or your own health … It seems essential to you to make your wish come true and you feel that your well-being depends on it, but obviously this dream is unreachable.

The situation in which you strive too hard for something and fail to achieve it is, so to speak, the opposite of happiness. You do what is necessary, and for one reason or another, what you expect does not happen, what is so important does not happen. How does this happen? How can this phenomenon be explained from a psychological point of view?

“If you want to build a boat, do not start by looking for wood, cutting boards or distributing the work, but first awaken the longing for the open sea.”

Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Why are you striving too much for something?

The first question to ask yourself in such cases is why are you striving so much for that something? The key to this is “so much” or “too much”. This excess shows that you have constructed circumstances that have led to an obsessive-compulsive situation. You feel a very strong need and the satisfaction of it becomes the decisive factor for your well-being. You feel that this something that you are almost anxiously pursuing is essential for your well-being, but is still illusory.

The next question then turns to whether what you are striving for really has the transformative power that you attribute to it. Many people believe that a great love would bring them away from loneliness, sadness, or isolation. Others believe that a highly respected job could give their life meaning. There are also those who have the feeling that if they had a lot more money, their problems would solve on their own, or that if they had overcome a certain state of health, their lives would have to be peaceful from then on. This practice of looking for the source of all happiness in a single point makes us perceive reality in a distorted way.

Such distortions are both a cause and a consequence of an idealization process. In the end, we assume that there is a state of full life, a paradise that should be achieved. Allegedly it is the failure to reach that paradise that makes us dissatisfied. In doing so, we are making a grave error.

Why does what you strive too hard for doesn’t come to you?

The question of why you are not achieving what you long for can be answered in different ways. A first approximation leads us to the conclusion that sometimes we just want things that don’t exist or don’t have the effect we hope they will do. Often times we are caught up in impossible desires and unrealizable fantasies, such as: B. to be saved or to acquire an attribute that would give weight to our existence. Social recognition, for example, would give us a feeling of transcendence that we have not yet felt. Or the love of another person is supposed to dissolve our lack of self-love. Ultimately, we hope that the way we live it, the way we built it, suddenly disappears and becomes an existence without flaws or flaws. Do you recognize yourself in it?

While it is politically correct to say that “anything can be achieved”, the truth is that it is not. There are goals that are impossible to achieve and it is important to recognize them. For example, we cannot live forever. Nor is it possible to prevent suffering from entering our lives. To strive for it must end in frustration.

Another thing to consider is what Jung called “synchronicity”: circumstances that coincide with the unconscious processes we are going through. Sometimes we just look at our minds and see that there is a great longing that doesn’t materialize. Maybe we unconsciously want something else, and sometimes that’s exactly what we achieve.