You've been chasing the feeling of "arriving" your whole life.
When I get the promotion, then I’ll feel successful.
When I lose the weight, then I’ll feel confident.
When I find the relationship, then I’ll feel complete.
When I hit that income level, then I’ll feel secure.
But here’s what nobody tells you: arrival never feels how you think it will.
You get the thing you’ve been chasing, feel good for about a week, then the emptiness returns. The goalpost moves. A new “if only” takes its place.
This is called the arrival fallacy—the belief that achieving a goal will fundamentally change how you feel. It won’t.
Psilocybin often reveals this uncomfortable truth: fulfillment isn’t at the destination. It’s in the quality of your attention right now.
Modern life is built on the arrival fallacy:
Graduate high school → college → good job → promotion → marriage → house → kids → retirement → happiness?
Each milestone promises fulfillment but delivers temporary satisfaction followed by the question: “What’s next?”
You spend your whole life in the future, convinced that happiness is just one more achievement away. Meanwhile, your actual life is happening in the present moments you’re too distracted to notice.
How Psilocybin Reveals the Illusion
Microdosing often shifts your relationship with achievement:
You start noticing how little your happiness actually correlates with external accomplishments. You see how the anticipation of goals feels better than achieving them.
Common insights: “I got everything I thought I wanted and I still feel the same” “The process was more enjoyable than the outcome” “My happiness depends more on my mindset than my circumstances” “I’ve been postponing contentment for a future that never arrives”
You realize that if you’re not okay now, you won’t be okay then either.
Try This: The Completion Reflection
Think about a major goal you achieved in the past:
How long did the satisfaction last?
What feeling were you hoping to get from it?
Did achieving it change your baseline happiness?
What replaced it as your new “if only” goal?
Most people discover that achievement provides a brief high followed by a return to baseline—and then the search for the next thing begins.
The Presence Practice
Fulfillment isn’t found in achievement—it’s found in engagement:
- The difference between doing dishes while resenting them vs doing dishes with full attention
- The difference between exercise as punishment vs movement as celebration
- The difference between relationships as checkboxes vs connections as experiences
You can be present while working toward goals. That’s actually where lasting satisfaction lives.
- You enjoy the process instead of white-knuckling toward outcomes
- Goals become preferences instead of prerequisites for happiness
- You celebrate progress without needing perfection
- You're less anxious because your wellbeing isn't hostage to future events
- You actually show up for your life instead of constantly rehearsing for the next chapter
Paradoxically, releasing attachment to outcomes often helps you achieve them more easily.
The Microdosing Insight
Psilocybin often reveals that fulfillment is available right now, regardless of circumstances:
Not because you’ve achieved everything. Not because problems have disappeared. But because presence itself is inherently satisfying when you stop resisting it.
You learn to find richness in ordinary moments instead of waiting for extraordinary ones.
You'll never arrive because arrival isn't a destination—it's a quality of engagement with whatever's happening.
The promotion, the relationship, the weight loss, the money—none of it will make you fundamentally different. You'll still be you, just with different circumstances.
The question isn’t what you need to achieve to be happy. It’s what you need to release to notice you already are.
So what if you stopped waiting to arrive?
Mush love,
Mushie Media of the Week:
"When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing"
by: Daniel H. Pink
