Have you ever reached a juicy goal and then robbed yourself of 93.6% of the joy by moving the goal posts? So that your originally-agreed-upon-with-yourself goal wasn’t actually achieved—because now you’ve got to do a little bit (or a lot a bit) more? And then at that point you’ll for sure be happy… unless you move the goal posts again, which you will probably do, BECAUSE YOU ARE A BLOODY RELENTLESS GOAL-POST-MOVER?

Yeah I don’t know anything about that at all.

Ha! That’s what I did when I wrote a book called You Only Die Once: How to Make It to the End with No Regrets… ironically, a book about loving the smithereens out of life (before we inevitably die). I unwittingly made my happiness contingent on an elusive, moving target of Never Enough-ness, which placed any lasting sense of satisfaction juuust out of reach. Had I written Taxidermy Skills for Enthusiastic Beginners, for example (which I definitely won’t write but there’s nothing stopping you from penning that sure-fire bestseller), I could handle being Almost Happy while consistently moving the goal posts. But publishing a book about happiness and then having those 352 pages be the very source of my not-quite-happiness, well. There’s a plot twist 😏.

People kept saying, “You must be SO HAPPY—you did it!!”, as though I had staggered through a marathon finish line and could put my feet up and have a smoke because phew! The goal had been attained! I felt unsettled every time someone assumed I was happy just because I could hold a book I wrote in my hands. Fascinatingly, lots of people think happiness for a writer comes from the possession of their book… from gazing at it on one’s bookshelf (obviously displayed in oh-so-artful ways for the benefit of podcast interview backgrounds).

Instead I looked suspiciously at this blue and yellow book that was supposed to make me happy. People said it was going to make me happy! Other authors I know felt happy to hold their books—”complete,” even! I identified with every mother out there who’s ever confessed to not really bonding with their newborn baby. I did not wrap YODO up in swaddling clothes. I was not complete.

I’ve always wanted to write a book, but I never fathomed that satisfaction would *poof!* arrive from just having it be… done. I guess I envisioned YODO as a means to an end… leading to something bigger (again with those goal posts). I let myself off the hook for not feeling eternal satisfaction just because the book had been birthed. So I naively waited for book-related-happiness to knock on my door from… elsewhere?

Cue important memory for the therapist! I did this “book unboxing video” (which was a total creative blast to put together—that was glee-inducing), yet when I actually unboxed the box full of books, I didn’t feel feelings. I wasn’t at risk of using the box cutter on myself—!!!—but I was expecting to feel feelings that everyone had insisted I’d feel… feelings that simply didn’t manifest for me. I told myself I’d for sure feel feelings (of the elated sort!) on “pub day” (publication day)—my day of Newly Minted Author Merriment.

Me, opening my box of books and waiting for feelings (spoken like a true psychopath).

So pub day came on May 7, 2024, and it was happy! and! fun! because I planned a bunch of fun things—including a banana split in a skull-shaped bowl for dinner (highly recommend), and leaving a copy of the book at Frank Sinatra’s grave (I was going to go back to old blue eyes’ grave on YODO’s one-year anniversary, but it occurred to me that he was probably still dead and likely hadn’t made much traction on the book since last year). I was waiting for More. I didn’t know exactly what More meant, but it was definitely more than I was feeling. But wait! I just put a book out that some well-known people definitely didn’t hate! People were buying the book! Friends were posting cute pictures of themselves on Instagram holding the book with supportive smiles! Wasn’t that enough? No, stupid. MORE.

“I wish I had figured out what would make me happy ahead of time,” I’ve been saying, which is FULL-ON ABSURD. Or is it? Does mapping out an “I will be happy when ____” plan set us up for contentment? I studied happiness in freaking grad school and I should know better. I was (and still am!) bashing myself with questions like, “shouldn’t happiness be organic,” and “can’t you just feel it… why do you need to set up expectations for when you’re allowed to feel it”? This leads me to…

Ways I could have maybe possibly gauged “success” as an author:

• Tracking sales numbers. I made a living for too many years measuring Key Performance Indictors (*insert gag face*) and I didn’t want to eviscerate the soul of the book by graphing audiobook sales and quantifying hardcover sales and benchmarking e-book sales. (Okay so the publisher does all those graphy computations anyways, but I didn’t want to look too closely at them.) I knew better than to fall into “the success of my book is contingent on numbers” mentality that I was prone to. Book sales have been going okay (no one has yelled at me about the numbers yet!) and I am even more fine with my head in the sales-sand. I don’t want to obsess over how many books were sold last week in Ireland. (Probably zero. Ireland: WTF?)
• Getting great PR. Oh this one’s alluring! I almost succumbed to the siren song of the news media, guys. I was so fortunate to have great coverage/ placements/ interviews/ mentions when You Only Die Once came out. (Can I just get all gushy/ braggy for a sec and remind you that an excerpt of YODO was featured in Oprah Daily?! And I was featured on the Oprah Daily Instagram page?!?! Okay, I’ll catch my breath in a sec—Oprah makes me woozy. Hold on… okay.) See? It’s intoxicating! And I felt “happy” the day-or-three after a cool PR mention was made, and then I felt a bit like a crack addict wondering when my next hit would be. I went from euphoric highs to predictable “now what” lows, given the superficiality of the whole darned thing. I did not like the person I was becoming: “Yeah, I had the NYT shout-out on Tuesday… and now it’s Friday, and WHERE IS MY NEXT MENTION?!” (*crumpling on the floor, tapping the veins in my arms*). I don’t like that girl. So I decided not to keep being her. (But damn it, media hits sure are ego-assuaging.)
• Impact! Blessed, beloved impact. This one is the answer we’re supposed to have when we write any kind of self-help book, I guess, and thankfully it really was a source of happiness for me… albeit a depleting one. When I’d hear from a reader—especially a reader who was a stranger who had no reason to be nice to me—saying nice things about YODO, sharing how the book helped in some way to wake them up to life, well whooo! That felt meaningful. It still feels meaningful. And I feel the twingles of embarrassment to admit this, but it’s Still Not Enough. What would be enough? Hearing from 250 people a day? 850 people? (God that would be miserably overwhelming.) How does one know when they’ve checked the box of Making an Impact? I still wanted to reach More people, speaking on More stages, to make More of an impact. So then I was left to debate (with myself and a glass of whatever was on the go) whether I was an insatiable More-Monster, destined to chase the goalposts I’d keep bumping out of reach, or if I was actually just a highly ambitious person who was keen to spread the word (to live before we die) in an Even More Massive way… and wasn’t that okay? Noble, even? In a “who am I to play it small, bitch?” kind of way (bastardized from the always-breathtaking poem by Mariane Williamson)? One explanation sounds alarming and the other sounds inspiring. I’m choosing to land on the “I am ambitious and want to make a More magnanimous impact” perspective because I think it’s largely true and also less scary than admitting I’m forever-goalpost-fucked.

I’ve been chasing happiness and fulfillment from this book, like a dog chasing a car; when the car stops, the dog is like, “wait, what? What am I supposed to do now? Gnaw at the bumper? Thanks but no.”

Schopenhauer, the original “life is pain” philosopher—think Eeyore with a PhD—helpfully pointed out that when we reach a goal of consequence we discover “how vain and empty it is.” Are we destined to feel unfulfilled, even after working hard to achieve the thing we’ve longed for?

After writing this on YODO’s one year anniversary (I went on a solo lunch to have a “drink + think”… I highly recommend it…. the drinking part is optional but the thinking part is kind of required), I reflected deeply on these last 52 Mondays of my life.

Happiness for me was found in the actual writing of the book. I have never felt more alive than in the months I was sitting on the couch typing YODO into my laptop.

Satisfaction was also found in the glee of getting a blurb from someone I admired (because this girl likes external validation: more fodder for therapy!).

Twingles of contentment have been found so far in the unclenching of my desire to have YODO Be Something Ginormous in my life. The more I relax and tell myself it doesn’t have to be my fulltime job to pedal YODO on the streetcorners (I don’t even really know what it means to “busk”?), and that the book can chug along with healthy nurturing from me (instead of all that angsty pushing), I start to feel more tender towards it.

So is that enough? To glean the happiness of the process of writing the book, like catching a lightening bug in a jar? To care less about the outcome of the book? No (*sigh*). We all know the lightening bug would die in the jar anyways. I suppose I need to work on being grateful for the highs I’ve already had and put the impact I still want to make in perspective. Life is short, sure, but I still have time to bring YODO to life in impactful ways that make me feel proud and energized. I can reframe MORE as an excited desire to help people wake up to life. I can maybe be kinder to myself for upping the ante—that it’s an indication I have high hopes and don’t want to settle.

Are you thwarting joy by moving the goalposts on a goal you’ve essentially reached, by wanting so much More, too? Does reading my little tale help you see your own situation in a new light? Does this Champagne problem thoroughly depress you?! (Please say no to that last part.) At the very least we get to reflect on what’s behind the feeling of “not-enough-ness” and maybe reconsider the conditions we’re placing around success and happiness.

I don’t have a formal answer here for how to not hose ourselves with goals that grow. Good old fashioned goal setting theory that debuted in 1968 (as did the Big Mac that year; fun fact!), tells us that “goal achievement leads to the pleasurable emotional state of satisfaction; failure to achieve a goal leads to the unpleasurable state of dissatisfaction.” Yet we all know it isn’t that simple. If I could publish You Only Die Once all over again, I ask myself what I’d do differently to guarantee happiness (bahaha, “guarantee”) or at least buffer against the pervasive feeling of “is that all”-ness.

This sounds underwhelming, but I think I’d manage my expectations better. I’d expect less from the book itself as The Source of Everlasting Life-Effervescence and put more energy into the point of why I wake up every day (other than to bring The Husband his coffee and feed Andy his little package of tuna): to spread the word about living before dying. I’d imagine pulling the book forward, not pushing it (because you know there’s a difference). I’d write out my successes and savor them, rather than glossing over them with a finger-snapping, “what’s next” attitude (like how I just learned that YODO going to be translated to Thai… let’s all have a launch party at the pretend-White Lotus resort in Thailand? That’s cool, right?). I’d collect the kind words people have shared and put them in a digital “warm + fuzzy” folder to bask in the glowiness of kind words on downer days. I can’t become less ambitious but I can become more reflective and grateful.

Or maybe the best answer is that I should’ve written that Taxidermy Skills for Enthusiastic Beginners book.

Let’s go get a Big Mac and see what we can do about identifying goals that matter, and being fair to ourselves while we pursue them. Less goal post moving, and more goal post gratitude. We only die once. Let’s die way less unfulfilled.