There’s more to life than this

Am I fulfilling my potential in life and what will I become when I grow up? When will I arrive at a place where I am happy with what I know and stop yearning for enlightenment? No matter when I ask the question, the answer has always been that there’s more to life than this.

There is always something more. There is always something you assume is better, at least because you haven’t done it yet.

When I was younger, for instance, I wanted to see the world, but had no money to travel and no job that would send me anywhere. I didn’t have much education and I had to work all the time to make enough money to pay for food, rent and clothing. I wanted to know, I wanted to see and I wanted to understand.

One of life’s basic paradoxes is inherent in this situation.

Today I have the education that I wanted back then. I live abroad, have a super challenging job and get to travel the world as much as I can possibly desire. I’m not a super rich man, but I have enough money to live a good life, at least from a material point of view.

But I am still not content. As a matter of fact I am possibly less content now than I was before. The reason is because knowledge comes at a price, and because gaining something, also means giving something up.

So even though the urge to travel is waning with an increasing amount of days spent at shabby hotels with paper thin walls and dirty sheets, I still don’t feel like I am fulfilling anything. Still I don’t feel like I am getting at any final destination.

Quite on the contrary. There is still more to life than this. The more I travel, the more I see and the more I understand, the more I realize that I don’t know.

The further I travel away from my old own self, the more I understand that I won’t arrive at any final station, where potentials will be fulfilled or where an urge for knowledge will quiet down. More experience keeps broadening my horizon. This keeps increasing my prospects and thus taking me even further away from fulfilling my potential in life.

Ironic, isn’t it.