the violent desire to be ‘great’

the violent desire to be ‘great’

gor

Oct 13, 2026

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we have become very good at imagining the lives we want and strangely impatient with the lives we have. you can spend years working towards something, convinced that reaching it will finally make you feel like you are doing enough, only to get there and find yourself thinking about the next thing. the satisfaction lasts a little while. then the old restlessness returns, dressed up as a new ambition, and you begin again.

i think we are more afraid of being ordinary than we like to admit. somewhere along the way, we learned that being good at something is not enough; we must be exceptional. having a decent career is not enough; we must be wildly successful. enjoying our lives is not enough; we must have something impressive to show for them. even our dreams have acquired an audience. we imagine telling people what we have accomplished, imagine the admiration, imagine finally becoming someone nobody can overlook. it is difficult to know how much of what we want belongs to us and how much comes from the fear of being forgettable.

you can see it in the way we talk about time. every year becomes a deadline. every birthday invites an assessment of what we have achieved and what everyone else seems to have figured out. someone younger gets published, builds a business, moves abroad, or finds the success we have been working towards, and suddenly we are questioning the shape of our own lives. we forget that another person’s progress has very little to do with our worth. we know this intellectually, of course. knowing something and managing to live as though we believe it are two different things.

there is nothing wrong with wanting more. we should want to learn, create, travel, build, and discover what we are capable of. the trouble begins when our ambitions make us resent the lives we are living in their pursuit. we start treating the present as an inconvenience, something to get through before the real story begins. rest feels undeserved. a day without measurable progress makes us anxious. we postpone the things we love because we imagine we will enjoy them properly once we have earned the right to stop worrying about everything else.

but when exactly does that happen? when does the work become enough, the money become enough, the recognition become enough? there is always another milestone waiting on the other side of the one we have just reached. if we make achievement responsible for our sense of worth, we give it a job it cannot do. no accomplishment can permanently settle the question of whether we are enough, especially when we keep changing the conditions under which we are willing to believe it.

meanwhile, our lives continue. our parents grow older while we build careers. friendships change because people move, fall in love, have children, and become occupied with lives that no longer overlap with ours as easily. the people who once had entire afternoons to spend with us now have to find an evening three weeks in advance. one day, we may look back at a period we considered unproductive and realise it was the last time we all lived close enough to meet without planning it. we cannot know which years we will miss until they have become memories.

i find that thought difficult because i want a great deal from my life, too. i want to do work i am proud of. i want to see the world, learn things that change my understanding of it, and make something that outlives the moment in which it was made. i don’t want to look back and feel that i was afraid to try. but i also don’t want to become so consumed by the person i am trying to be that the people around me only get whatever is left over.

perhaps we need to reconsider what it means to have made something of ourselves. we speak about greatness as though it must be visible to other people, as though a life becomes valuable only when it produces evidence of its own importance. yet most of what makes a life worth living will never appear on a résumé. it is in the friendships we maintained, the people we showed up for, the curiosity we never lost, the kindness we offered when there was nothing to gain from it. these things may not make us remarkable in the eyes of the world. they still count for something.

you can spend your life trying to become somebody and forget that you are already somebody to the people who love you. we can become so occupied with leaving a mark that we fail to notice the lives we are already part of. and the cruelest possibility is that we might achieve everything we set out to achieve, look around at the end, and realise we were too busy preparing for life to participate in it.

i hope we keep our ambitions. i hope we make things, take chances, work hard, and surprise ourselves with what we can do. but i hope we learn to want these things without turning our lives into a constant examination of what is missing. there is a world to discover, work worth doing, and so much we have yet to become. there are also people sitting across the table from us, waiting to tell us about their day.

we should make something of ourselves. i only hope we remember that the making is happening while we are here, among the people we love, in the years we keep trying to get through. greatness, whatever it ends up meaning to each of us, should leave us with a life we recognise as our own. it should give us more to live for, not become the reason we keep putting life off.

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please do not sacrifice the people who actually matter to you as if they are some dead weight holding you back from climbing your mountain of greatness because the person you become on the way up is the person who arrives at the top so you better make sure that person isn’t lonely.

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