Maybe the goal isn’t to become more but to remember enough.
Every December we start to make quiet promises to ourselves. Next year we’ll be more organised, more disciplined, more productive, more something. We buy new planners, set intentions, and create a vision of the improved version of who we might become.
And yet, for all the goal-setting and self-improvement, a quiet fatigue often lingers underneath. The harder we try to fix ourselves, the more we feel that something is broken. We treat life like a project in need of completion, as though peace will arrive once everything is finally under control.
But what if nothing needs fixing? What if the constant striving is what keeps us from feeling whole in the first place?
The idea that we are somehow incomplete is deeply rooted in modern life.
Every advertisement, every productivity hack, every wellness trend feeds it. There is always something to optimise, always another version of ourselves waiting just beyond the horizon. It keeps us moving, but it rarely leaves us satisfied.
Philosophy offers a gentler view.
It suggests that wisdom isn’t found in adding more, but in seeing more clearly. When the mind slows down enough to notice what’s already here, we begin to see that balance and clarity were never missing only covered over by noise, comparison, and hurry.
This isn’t to say that goals are meaningless. Change can be good, effort can be noble, growth can be necessary. But there’s a difference between acting from a sense of lack and acting from awareness. When we act from lack, we chase, we measure, compare, and compete. When we act from awareness, we move from stillness, not restlessness. The same actions working, learning, improving feel lighter because they are no longer attempts to fix something that was never broken.
True balance is not a matter of perfect schedules or flawless habits. It comes from knowing when to act, when to pause, and when to rest. It’s the understanding that life moves in rhythms energy rises and falls, clarity fades and returns. We are not meant to be in constant motion, nor in constant retreat. We are meant to live in between attentive, awake, and responsive.
As another year closes, perhaps the invitation is not to become a new person, but to see the one who is already here. To stop rehearsing life and start experiencing it. To notice how, beneath all the striving, there is already enough.