"If I only had a little more time, money, or love, then I'd finally feel good."
Most of us have thought some version of that sentence, maybe even said it out loud, without really noticing what it actually contains. There's the lack, "if I only had". There's the longing for more. There's the hope, the future everything gets pushed toward, "then I would". And there's the goal, finally getting to feel good, as though the possibility weren't already available right now.
That's the structure this chapter is about, not the money, the time, or the love itself, but how we build our entire lives around a sentence that always points away from the present.
By lack I simply mean a feeling that something's missing, that you're incomplete, not enough, or alone right now, and that whatever you're longing for would fill that emptiness if it just arrived. It's exactly that feeling that carries the sentence we started with, if I only had. It's that feeling, not the longing itself, that's the actual core of the Wanting Trap.
We've all heard of celebrities who reach wealth and success, everything they said they wanted, and still stand there with an inner emptiness nothing of it could fill. It's easy to think that's just their problem, but the same principle applies to the rest of us, just on a smaller scale. "A little more" rarely turns out to be a little more. It's just the next round of the same sentence. The chase for the next thing is, like the phone addiction we already talked about, tied to the brain's reward system, a hit that's short-lived by design, built to push us toward the next thing rather than let us rest in what we already have.
Can a person ever get enough? The question deserves to be asked outright, because the answer says something important about this entire trap. Some people seem able to land in enoughness with surprisingly little. Others chase more and more, money, things, validation, without ever reaching a point where it's enough. The difference rarely comes down to how much someone actually has. It comes down to what they carry inside them while they have it.
Take something as ordinary as buying shoes. No one needs a hundred pairs. And yet many people keep shopping, not because the shoes fill a practical gap, but for the purchase itself, that small, quick hit in the moment you hit buy or walk out of the store with a new bag. Dopamine is behind it, but not quite in the way most people think. Dopamine is less about the reward itself and more about the chase for it. The brain releases it most strongly right before you get what you want, not afterward. That's why waiting for a package often feels more charged than opening it, and why the new sweater loses its shine within a few days of hanging in the closet. The system is built to chase, not to rest in what's already been achieved.
That also explains the pendulum many people recognize, the high that follows a purchase, a goal, or a compliment, and the crash that comes right after. It isn't weakness or an imbalance of character. It's a nervous system that's built a habit of seeking its highs outside itself, and that therefore has to fall just as far as it rose, before starting to chase the next high all over again.
The difference between someone who's satisfied and someone who never is rarely lies in how much either person already has. It lies in whether they carry a baseline feeling of already being enough, or whether every new thing has to prove something that never quite feels proven. Someone who already feels whole can receive more without it changing anything at the core. Someone carrying an emptiness will always experience whatever just arrived as not quite enough, because it was never what was actually missing.
Understanding this is itself an opening. You no longer need to feel ashamed of the purchase, the chase, the pendulum, just see it for what it is, a nervous system looking for rest in the wrong place. The rest isn't in the next pair of shoes. It's in stopping the chase for it out there altogether.
There's also an interesting countertrend among some of the wealthiest and most famous people. Some reach a point where they actively start divesting themselves of what they've accumulated, selling houses, cars, and possessions, describing it as liberation rather than loss, as though only at the peak of ownership did they understand how much it had actually held them captive. It says something important, that the problem was never the amount, it was the relationship to it.
Simplicity might be the real luxury, and the real freedom. I've lived through both ends myself, periods with millions and periods with only a few coins left, and the strange thing is it never actually mattered much which end I was standing in. Strip most things away and it's surprisingly little you actually need, maybe just your health. Land truly in that insight and everything else becomes a bonus, extra nice to have when it comes, but never a requirement for feeling good.
The Wanting Trap is harder to spot than many other traps, precisely because wanting itself is so often seen as something good, a sign of drive, ambition, and direction, tied to growth and moving forward, to the whole idea of wanting more, becoming better, and pushing ahead in life. And yet it wasn't until I genuinely started questioning the wanting itself, not whatever I happened to want at the time but wanting as a fundamental way of relating to life, that my whole way of seeing it shifted.
The spark came when I read Michael Singer's book The Surrender Experiment, about how he decided to stop steering his life through wishes and plans and instead meet whatever showed up in front of him, fully, exactly as it was. The point was never to become passive or indifferent to life. The point was to stop seeing what happens as a mistake, a disappointment, a wounded ego not getting its way, and instead see it as an opportunity to make the best of whatever was actually being offered, a shift in attitude rather than a technique.
Wanting is otherwise treated as almost sacred in our culture, and not wanting something can easily be read as indifference or lack of ambition, but here it's worth separating two things that easily get tangled together, wanting something and wanting something out of lack. You can still move toward things, wish for them, strive for them, without being caught in the Wanting Trap, because what decides it isn't the goal but the undertone you're moving with. One moves out of dissatisfaction with what already is, an inner state where nothing is ever enough. The other moves out of an already-present satisfaction, a feeling of already being whole that's still happy to receive more when it comes.
Someone who wants something strongly out of lack rarely feels satisfied even once they get it, because the next longing arrives immediately, the next bag, the next car, the next job, the next million, an endless line of nexts that never fills, since it was never the bag or the million that was missing in the first place. It was an emptiness from within, and that emptiness can't be fed by what comes from outside, it only grows with every new attempt to fill it with the wrong material.
We're trained to want this way starting in childhood, rarely out of any bad intention but because our entire surrounding culture is built on it, advertising that creates a need only to then sell the solution, comparisons with others that stir up a lack where none existed before. The more you're exposed to that pattern, the more normal it becomes, until wanting-from-lack is the only form of desire you have access to.
You could ask whether this way of wanting is even part of our true nature, or whether it's a far more modern construction than we'd like to believe, a result of a culture built around consumption, comparison, and constant growth, rather than something innate. Meister Eckhart's idea of acting without a why, already mentioned in this book, points toward a different way of living, not without movement or engagement, but without the constant demand that the movement justify itself through a result. It's entirely possible to strive, create, and build, without the striving being born out of lack.
A reasonable objection here is a practical one. How do you even work toward a goal if you don't want it? The difference doesn't lie in whether you're moving toward something, but in where the movement comes from. You can absolutely have goals, work toward them and plan for them, without doing it out of lack, if the goal is held loosely rather than desperately, as a direction rather than a condition for feeling good. Alan Watts, the British philosopher who did so much to bring Eastern thinking to the West, described something he called the law of reversed effort, the idea that the harder we grasp for security, happiness, or control, the more they slip away, while they come, paradoxically, more easily to whoever has stopped grasping. It isn't the goal itself that's the problem. It's the cramped belief that you can't be whole until the goal is reached.
It becomes especially clear in how we search for partners today. Dating apps are built, more or less explicitly, on a logic of specifications, height, interests, values, a checklist of desired traits to tick off before anyone even gets a chance. A person met through a checklist is rarely more than the sum of the boxes they happened to fill, and a relationship built on someone exactly matching a wishlist rarely carries more substance than the relationship between a customer and a product. The checklist mindset itself, the desire to order up the right person as though they were any other product, is the Wanting Trap in one of its most literal, contemporary forms.
Many will object here and say they actually wanted something very strongly, fought for it and eventually got where they wanted. Sure, it's possible to get somewhere through sheer force, discipline, and endurance, but the method is often slow, painful, and full of unnecessary resistance, and more importantly, it rests on a fundamental separation between who you are and who you think you need to become, a gap that doesn't disappear just because you eventually reach the other side of it. The one who wants to become healthy starts from being sick. The one who wants to become rich starts from being poor. The one who wants to become loved starts from being alone, and the moment we make those states our identity, we cement them.
The moment we define ourselves by what we lack, we place whatever we're longing for outside ourselves, as something over there, in the future, to be achieved later. It's often compared to the donkey and the carrot, an old fable about a donkey driven forward by hunger for a carrot tied to a stick hanging just in front of its nose. However far the donkey walks, it never arrives, because the carrot moves at exactly the same pace as the donkey itself. That's what the fable is really pointing at, that the goal recedes at the same pace as the wanting, since it's the wanting itself that keeps the distance alive. That's where "then I would" always lives, one step further ahead, no matter how far you've already come.
The world doesn't respond to our wishes. It responds to our self-image. There's something in the old idea that faith means already possessing what you're asking for, rather than waiting to receive it. Before the words even finish forming into a prayer, the one praying has already stepped, inwardly, into the feeling of the wish being fulfilled, and lives from there, as though it were already true. This isn't magic in the sense of trickery, it's a shift of identity, from the one who lacks to the one who already is.
A particularly sharp version of this is what happens when someone else gets what you wanted for yourself. Envy and bitterness are rarely reactions to the other person's success itself, they're reactions to your own sense of lack, sharpened by the reminder that it was apparently possible to reach, just not for you. It confirms exactly the fear the Wanting Trap has been whispering all along, that you don't quite measure up, that you were overlooked, that others apparently deserved it more. But envy rarely points at the person you envy. It points at your own unprocessed emptiness. The bitterness that sometimes follows is the same thing, frozen in place over time, a refusal to let go of the feeling of having been unfairly passed over.
Letting go is a phrase often used in these contexts, but it carries a small trap of its own worth noticing. Talking about letting go of something already assumes you're holding onto something, that there's a grip to release. But if the lack you're trying to let go of was never real to begin with, just a thought you've grown used to carrying, the whole idea of letting go becomes slightly misleading. Real letting go has less to do with getting rid of something and more to do with relaxing, letting your shoulders drop, letting the nervous system step down from its watch. The paradox is that the more you actively try to let go, the more you hold on, because the very effort confirms there's still a grip left to release.
I recognize this especially clearly from the time I ran my own company. You set forecasts, budgets, targets to hit, all driven by a wish to get there. Hit the target and it was success, a good day, a receipt proving you were good enough. Miss it and it was disappointment, a bad day. I had a friend who once said, completely sincerely, that she felt exactly however her stock portfolio was doing that day. It's an almost absurd thought when put into plain words, but it describes exactly how many of us actually live, without ever putting words to it.
Today I'm in a different place. I still want things, of course, time, freedom, travel, but I've learned to already feel as though I have them, whether they arrive or not. If they come, wonderful. If they don't, also wonderful. It isn't slackness, it's a relaxed sense that I'm okay regardless of the outcome.
Maybe the only real shift is swapping the sentence out entirely. Not "if I only had, then I'd feel good." Just, I feel good, whatever comes next. Take away the cramp and the resistance and it's like opening a window in a stuffy room and finally letting the air in.