Successful but Empty: You Climbed the Whole Ladder and It Was Against the Wrong Wall

If you've ever bought a house, you'll remember the time that you signed the papers and the house was yours or the title was yours or the account finally held the number you'd been walking toward for a decade. And maybe you poured a drink or you didn't and you waited for the thing you'd been promised would arrive and it didn't come. And you might remember there was a flatness where the arrival was supposed to be and you stood in the middle of the wind you'd given half your life to feel and didn't feel the way you thought you would.

But then you felt something worse, ashamed that you didn't feel the way you thought you were going to feel. Now that shame is its own trap and I'd like you to see that clearly because you have by every visible measure the thing. And there are people who would trade places with you in a heartbeat to stand exactly where you are right now. So where do you put this emptiness? You can't say it out loud because you'd sound like you were lacking gratitude and worse you suspect you already are.

So you bury it and you call it a phase or you book a holiday, you set a new goal and you add another rung above the one you just reached because adding a rung is the one move you actually know how to make. And that flatness waits on the top of that rung as well. The whole world has one answer ready for you and the answer is gratitude. Count your blessings. Look how much you have. Gratitude is a real and very good thing.

But watch what it gets put to work doing here. Be grateful was never given to you for your peace. It was given to you to keep you climbing to make the question feel like a sin so you'd never stop long enough to ask who's later this was. Gratitude tells you to bow to coping, manage and endure the life you built. But coping is an arrival and managing isn't a life and enduring isn't what you are promised at the top. And you feel the emptiness and you feel also ashamed of feeling it.

And so you reach for gratitude to silence the one piece of information that the emptiness was correctly handing you. And the other answer which is just as common says you simply haven't done enough yet that the satisfaction is one rung further up and so you need to up level both do exactly the same job. They keep you on the ladder and keep you quiet. So stay with this feeling for a moment instead of silencing it because it's not a character floor.

The emptiness at the top of the ladder is information and the information is very plain to see. The script you call success was never written for your flourishing. It was written for the people whose approval you needed when you felt small. And for a world that runs better when you spend your one life chasing its markers instead of asking what your own are. The goals you built a whole life around were handed to you by parents, culture, everyone who got something when you wanted what they wanted.

And you absorbed a picture of the good life, this much money, this kind of partner, this type of achievement. When you ran at it with everything you had and the freeing terrible thing you find at the summit is that arriving at someone else's destination doesn't feel like arriving, it doesn't feel like anything and nothing in you was ever actually headed there. So you finally get the promotion and the house and the numbering the account you always chased.

And instead of arriving you feel flat and hollow and ashamed for feeling it. And that emptiness at the top isn't a lack of gratitude, it's accuracy. It's the most honest part of you finally getting a word in after years of being outvoted by the part that just wanted to win and achieve and be successful. And it isn't telling you that you need more, it's telling you that you climbed the wrong ladder on the wrong wall and climbing it faster or higher will never turn it into the right wall and the right ladder.

The ladder was never the problem, the wall was. And I want to slow down on how this happens because it isn't that someone sat you down and told you what to want, even though sometimes that happens too. It's much more subtle than that and it's also much more total than that too. When we're small we learn what gets us love. We notice what makes people, we depend upon light up what makes them proud and what makes them turn toward you and what makes them cool or worry or look away or give you a look of disapproval.

And so a child in that position will do almost anything to stay in the warmth, in the connection, in the belonging. And so we become very early and very skillfully whatever was rewarded. If achievement was the currency of love in your house, you became an achiever. If it was being good, being easy, being presive, being the one who never needed much and you became it so thoroughly that there was no longer any visible difference between the strategy and the self.

The wanting felt like it came from the inside because it had been inside you for as long as you could remember. And that's what makes it so hard to see and so unhinging when you finally do. Because you didn't get talked into the wrong life, you were shaped toward it before you had any say and it was done with love, which is exactly why it took winning to expose it. Standing at a summit you don't want, having spent half your life getting there, the instinct is to go and find the so-called right goal, the right summit and start climbing that mountain instead.

But you can't sure cut it that way because rushing to a new target is the same machine re-running on a fresh object. The harder move is to stop and to ask a question most of us have never actually asked, how much of what I call my life did I ever actually consciously choose. And most people can't answer that question confidently because most of it was installed before you could choose anything. The wanting itself was inherited and until you can tell apart a desire that's truly yours from one that was placed in you by people who needed you to want something.

Every summit will go on feeling that the last one because the chooser was never actually asked. You can spend an entire life brilliantly succeeding in things you never actually wanted, chasing their career your parents were proud of, the milestones that made everyone not in smile, the good life you inherited before you were old enough to question it. Now this is not a rare tragedy, it's almost by default for most people.

And the script runs so deep it feels like you. And the way out was never to try harder or want more, it's to get quiet enough and honest enough to finally tell apart the life you were handed from the life you'd actually choose if you ever knew the choice was actually yours. So consider what that flat feeling actually is, the one you've been ashamed of and trying to gratitude your way out of. It's a part of you waking up looking around at the life you built and saying, this isn't it.

And I know that now, which means I'm free to want something true. But most people never get that signal, some get it and then medicate it the moment it lands. And you got it and you're still standing here with it. And the emptiness isn't a punishment for having too much, it's the first honest thing in years. So if you've climbed the whole ladder and found nothing at the top, you don't have to quit your job and burn your whole life down.

That's the panic talking. And the panic is just the old script terrified of losing its grip on you. What you actually have to do is quieter and much braver. Stop for the first time and find out who's under there when the achieving goes silent. Because the goal was never to reach the top of the wall. It was to become someone who knew which wall was theirs. And that someone has been waiting under the winning and the achievement and the success the whole time.

If anything in this episode made you want to explore what you just heard, I've made it easy for you to do so. In the show notes, there's a link to access a book called Before Approaching the Threshold, which is the gateway into this work. Alongside this you'll also receive 14 days free access to the Atlas and intelligence trained on everything written and recorded in this body of work. And it's there to think alongside you on whatever you're actually sitting with.

Both are free to start and the link to access them is in the show notes. This was Michael Loria and you're listening to the architect speaks.