The Contract That's Making You Miserable (And How to Break It)
What to do when longing takes up too much room.
Last year I heard something on a podcast that completely blew my mind. It’s from Naval Ravikant, a successful entrepreneur, investor and thinker.
He said:
“Desire’s a contract you make with yourself to be unhappy until you get what you want.You become disturbed because you want something. Then you work really hard to get it and are miserable in the meantime.
Finally, when you get it, you revert to the state you were in before you had it.
It’s not like you achieve some peak level of bliss that you stay on forever”.
Here I was, navigating a period of real unhappiness, largely due to chasing my latest goal — getting pregnant — and repeatedly failing at it for about two years, month after month.
Desire: Getting pregnant
Happiness Status: Out of reach
Although I knew that my desire was valid and that infertility is a difficult experience, I couldn’t help feeling frustrated. How could one unfulfilled goal overshadow everything else I had going on for me?
“Desire is a contract you make with yourself to be unhappy until you get what you want”.
For the next few days, this quote haunted me a little bit. I couldn’t stop toying with it in my mind.
Old me would have felt guilty about these emotions. She would have thought, “How dare you suffer when so many people have it worse?”
New me knew better: “You’re going through a hard thing and your feelings are valid”, she whispered kindly.
Still, I couldn’t ignore it: I was allowing this single chase to blind me to all previous desires, now fulfilled.
The Endless Chase
The modern world made it far too easy for us to fall into this trap:
Go to university, get a job, get a promotion, find a life partner, buy a house, get married, have kids, travel around, get promoted again, keep climbing, keep reaching, never stop.
Milestone unlocked — What’s next?
It’s like a rigged race in which the finish line just never stops moving. But what if happiness itself was a mirage?
Imagine if, instead of chasing happiness, we were taught to seek contentment, peace, serenity?
“A peaceful mind is the ultimate luxury.” — Naval Ravikant; another quote I love.
Some might argue that then we wouldn’t grow, we wouldn’t learn, and wouldn’t succeed.
I challenge that. Humans are wired to create, to connect with each other and to reach for more and better.
Competing with oneself is a beautiful thing.
Having life goals is essential.
But it should never turn invisible all the trophies and blessings surrounding us.
Corny but oh so powerful
It disappoints me that phrases like “cultivate gratitude” or “tap into gratitude” don’t carry nearly as much weight as they deserve.
In reality, gratitude is the closest thing to an anxiety antidote that I know.
And it soothes all kinds of suffering too.
The word gratitude sounds mainstream, diluted, maybe even corny.
Perhaps it conjures up caricatural images of people meditating on cliffs and eating grass.
And that’s too bad.
To me, gratitude is simply the practice of lingering on beautiful things, important things, acquired things.
It’s truly contemplating them.
It’s thinking:
“I am so lucky I have this person/thing in my life.”
“How blessed I was to have experienced that today.”
But in our buzzing daily lives, we refuse to pause.
Why bother, when we have Netflix and Instagram to numb our feelings?
Here’s the problem: they numb us in the moment — but as soon as the scrolling ends, you end up feeling worse.
My Go-To When Life Feels Hard
Instead of reaching for your phone or the remote, I suggest you pick up another tool. One that’s powerful because:
You can use it to navigate hard feelings and soothe yourself.
You don’t need anyone else to use it.
It takes a minimum of two minutes — for as long as you want.
You can start right away.
So here’s a user manual to improve your mood at any moment:
Grab a pen and notepad.
Find a quiet spot and relax. If you don’t have access to one, that’s okay — do this wherever you are.
List everything you can think to be grateful for. Literally anything.
If your mind says “nothing,” that’s okay. Give it a few more seconds.
On uninspiring days, I would doodle on the page, waiting for something to surface — and something always would.
If nothing comes to mind, start with the basics:
Being alive. Your health. Your family. Your friends.
Name them. Picture their faces. Then, go really granular. Leave nothing out — even the tiniest sparkles of joy.
Some days, you’ll only write a couple of things, and on others, the page will barely hold everything you’ll want to squeeze into it.
There’s no need to be original. If it made you feel good in any way, write it down.
Here are some of the things I have written in my gratitude pad:
Finishing a couple of tasks that I’d been procrastinating on for a while.
The leftovers from last night, meaning I don’t have to cook dinner.
The beautiful building facades I noticed on my walk.
Being complimented on my outfit by a stranger.
Saw a rainbow on my way back from work.
My health — without it, nothing matters.
Feeling energized by a meeting at work.
The dentist said I have no cavities.
A cool Spotify playlist I found.
Getting my eyebrows done.
The smell of the rain.
Train your brain to seek the good
Gratitude should never be a way to gaslight yourself.
It’s not a bandage you slap on an open wound.
Instead, it’s a way to remind myself of the beauty around me and of what I’ve accomplished so far.
A gentle nudge to not let one single desire blind me to everything else.
The beauty of this exercise is that after a few days, your mind will start actively searching for tiniest glimmers to include in that daily or weekly list. Over time, it’ll look for the silver lining in all kinds of situations.
It’ll become second nature to you — like some kind of superpower.
If it helps remove the pressure, you don’t need to stick to this forever. Think of it as a vitamin cure to help you through tough times.
To be honest, I don’t do this every week. But the few times I have, it’s been like a lasting reset.
So, for now, just start.
Write whatever comes to mind.
Feel grateful for it.
And give the tiny and big sparks in your life a chance to shine brighter.
What's one small thing you're grateful for right now? I'd love to read it in the comments.
People only think gratitude is a corny practice because they are not doing it right. When you feel into gratitude and make it part of your life, it becomes meaningful. Your brain starts to notice the beauty in the world. You can move towards your desired outcomes from where you are without feeling that you are lacking, because you already have so much. 💕
I hear you loud and clear on how “practicing gratitude” can feel corny. Whenever I catch my inner cynic scoffing at a wholesome practice that’s maybe a little cliché, I blast some 80s sugar metal through my headphones. Europe’s The Final Countdown, for instance.
Corny as hell. And absolutely glorious.
There’s something so shamelessly epic, earnest, and un-self-conscious about that genre that wipes out my Jean-Paul Sartre vibes in under three minutes.