The Pursuit of Love Through Achievement
The Early Seeds of Achievement-Based Love
A baby, before it can form conscious thought, receives cues from its environment about when love will flow. Picture a baby struggling to put on their t-shirt—a simple act that becomes a gateway for affirmation and celebration when done right. In these moments, the child learns that accomplishment equals love. This pattern continues throughout childhood, where expectations met are celebrated and those unmet are greeted with frustration—either externally when we don’t perform, or internally when we do but find ourselves somehow still unfulfilled.
In this dance of early love and achievement, we mirror what Winnicott called the “good enough mother”, not the perfect parent, but one who gradually allows disappointment to enter the child’s world. Yet somehow our modern lives have twisted this natural process. Where once there was room for imperfection and growth, we now find ourselves trapped in an endless cycle of proving our worth. Like children forever trying to reach the cookie jar, we stretch ourselves toward impossible standards, forgetting that love, in its purest form, asks nothing of us at all.
As Rilke reminds us. These dragons—our fears of inadequacy, our desperate need for validation—might just be waiting for us to recognise them as the wounded parts of ourselves that need not achievement, but acceptance.
We run our whole lives for this achievement, and it drives us to the ground. Everything we do is for that approval we so want to feel again. Even though we may deny it is the only factor, I believe it is one of the primal factors—the need for belonging that we have hardwired into us. Because you and I share the same air, and wherever we go, we find humans having their own quirks, but in that, they are much more like us than we think.
Knight holding a sword, facing a dragon. By Midjourney.
The Illusion of Individualism
Here we see our natural organismic behaviour to want to be in groups and feel the collective spirit that inevitably binds us. This is where we can imagine that we are steadily killing this spirit in our brain fog of individualism. We have started to think of only ourselves being able to satisfy all our needs and an increasing dependence on comfort.
Money, this abstract symbol we chase so religiously, masks a profound truth about human connection. Each bill we exchange, each digital transaction we make, obscures the complex web of human relationships that make our daily lives possible. The coffee we drink in the morning connects us to farmers across oceans, to traders, roasters, and baristas—yet we experience it as a simple exchange of currency for goods. This abstraction of human relationships into monetary value slowly erodes our awareness of our deep interdependence.
In older societies, as Lewis Hyde shows us, people were bound together not by currency but by gifts—ongoing cycles of giving and receiving that created lasting social bonds. When a hunter shared his catch with the village, it wasn’t a transaction but a contribution to a continuing cycle of reciprocity. When indigenous communities exchanged ceremonial objects, they weren’t just trading items but weaving the fabric of their social relationships. Each gift carried obligations, stories, and connections that money, in its cold efficiency, has eliminated. Today’s market economy tricks us into believing we can buy our independence, but each transaction still carries these invisible threads of human interdependence, whether we acknowledge them or not.
The Japanese concept of ‘amae’—this beautiful acknowledgment of our need to depend on others—stands in stark contrast to our Western myth of the self-made individual. It whispers to us an ancient truth: that dependence is not weakness but the very fabric of human society. As Buber understood, when we truly meet each other, something divine sparks between us—
Yet we keep our distance, afraid perhaps, of the voltage, clinging to our illusion of independence.
A lone person walking on a path that splits into many directions. By Midjourney.
For those who doubt this interdependence, my sincerest advice is to stop, go out and really try to see what it takes to build a life completely by yourself. This involves growing your own food, building your own house and everything that comes with maintaining these. It is no less than the famous Greek analogy of a Herculean task.
The Comfort Trap
What’s further driven our individuality is comfort. It is when facing the challenges and hardships in life that people bond together. The path through collective suffering is strewn with friendships of virtue where people have found powerful relatability in how one weathers change.
and it is my experience too that it takes away more than it gives.
Most of us realise too late or not at all that something has left us on our days on the couch that used to once bring light to our innocent eyes. It is widespread, and increasingly more, that we don’t face hardships to meet our basic needs. This is important because otherwise we are not truly experiencing our potential and we fall into a nurtured womb-like state from which we never emerge. The purpose of the womb is to give birth and living inevitably involves wounds. Our tireless escape from any kind of injury—mental, physical, emotional or spiritual—makes us cold and uncaring, not out of intent but a lack of capacity.
Joseph Campbell tells us, and in his words echoes an eternal truth about human growth. Consider the athlete who finds their strength not in victory but in recovering from defeat, or the artist who discovers their voice only after facing their deepest fears. Our stumbling points—those moments of crisis and challenge—are not obstacles to be avoided but gateways to transformation.
As Rumi tells us, we can also see this in the way a broken bone heals stronger at the point of fracture, how a forest regenerates more vibrantly after a fire. These are not mere metaphors but profound patterns that run through all of life.
Sebastian Junger observed this paradox in contemporary society—how the very adversities we avoid are the forces that could bind us together most powerfully. In times of natural disasters, wars, or collective challenges, people often report feeling more alive and connected than in times of peace and prosperity. Look at how neighbourhoods come alive during power outages, how strangers help each other during snowstorms, how communities rally together after hurricanes. These moments of shared challenge strip away our artificial barriers and reveal our fundamental need for each other.
Viktor Frankl, having witnessed humanity at its darkest in concentration camps, came to see that meaning emerges not from comfort but from our capacity to bear witness to both suffering and joy. In the camps, he observed how those who maintained a sense of purpose, who found meaning even in their suffering, were more likely to survive. This speaks to a deeper truth about human nature—that we are meaning-making creatures who come alive not in the absence of challenges but in how we face them. When we numb ourselves to one aspect of life, be it pain or joy, we inevitably numb ourselves to both. Our collective flight from discomfort has left us spiritually anaesthetised, watching life through windows we dare not open, afraid of both the storm and the sunshine. Yet it is precisely through these windows that we must learn to reach.
Living, in its fullest sense, means caring for other people and relating to them beyond your own sense of self, whatever that may include. Our society also has a delicious liking to reduce other people into facts that are irrelevant to their whole being. He’s a businessman, she’s a politician, he does this, she makes that, they believe in this, their faith is that. On and on we construct what we think are whole beings out of singular facets of a real being—one who we neglected to experience.
For how could we experience them fully? Everything we have been taught in how to relate to the world has been to objectify it. People become objects with whom we have agreements, and within these agreements, we find our way to meeting our own needs. This is what we call modern society. We punish those who meet their needs in ways not previously agreed upon. We shame those who operate in grey areas for they, unlike us, are not trying to fit in as hard as we think everyone should. It makes us uncomfortable and in a society that has started to worship comfort, the hatred for discomfort has reached sinful levels.
In the hell we are so desperately trying to avoid, we have also lost sight of the heaven that is in our very hearts and also everywhere we are. Our lives are by no means perfect but striving for perfection also brings with it a pair of glasses that can only see imperfection. Growth in nature is never a striving for perfection but a way of artfully expressing imperfection. So in this way we can also strive to grow and make ourselves more relatable to the humanity in others instead of judging and discarding them into our backroom pile of concepts about the world. Let us be a light to others in a way that they can be a light to ourselves when we need it the most. We are all members of life and we need no conditions to feel this love constantly coursing through our circulatory systems. We are circles and so is life. Where we come from is where we go. In the end, nothing is final and everything is changing. And in all these paradoxes, it is where we come to find ourselves maybe for the very first time—living it all.
