Motivation

I would like to explore the topic of motivation. The way I see it, motivation is most effective when it is an unquestioned drive to reach a goal. Whatever your goal might be, you desire it enough to go to great lengths to achieve it. Therefore, your drive must be pure enough for that motivating force to be strong.

We all know what motivating forces typically are in this world: desire for wealth, status, to please those closest to us, to avoid failure, the pursuit of happiness. Is there one thing that encompasses everything else? Some would argue that everyone's penultimate goal is to achieve happiness, which all these other things are necessary stepping stones to.

While I'd argue that is not true, too many people before me have done that every same thing, so I don't want to rehash a very old and almost cliched idea. I'd like to argue in the opposite way. What if a person has reached the point where they no longer believe that wealth status and all those good material acheivements can bring you happiness? But since a person still aspires to happiness, what then is the motivating force to achieve?

For me, I have to admit that I still have a few "ties that bind." Meaning, I feel some pressure to achieve, not merely for my own sake (in fact, very infrequently for myself per se) but a desire to not disappoint those closest to me. Which, I'm told, is not exactly the best way to go about motivating yourself. Yet a part of me wonders, if those ties should break and I am liberated, what then will I become? Will I float away gently to the netherlands, unemcumbered and unweighed by neither drives nor ambitions or any singular passion to continue striving? Wow, if ever there is a junkie in the making, I think I have great potential to live in a cloud.

But that's the thing. I know it would never happen that way. My two feet are planted solidly enough on the ground and I have a solid network, social and otherwise, that keeps me grounded too. I also have a degree of status anxiety, much as I hate to admit it, and while I'm no Napoleon, I still desire to work hard enough to get that one slice of pie.

But back to my original question and it still remains: what then shall motivate us and drive us when we are no longer so "sure" that all paths hitherto to be thought to reach happiness will indeed get us there? Then perhaps, after struggling with this existential problem - we must each forge new meanings for ourselves on what defines happiness. And then we must still continue to strive for it. It is the human condition and without it, we are incomplete.