Nobody Actually Wants Everything

There was a game I played as a kid that let you cheat. Not a glitch, not a secret you had to earn — the game just handed it to you. Type in a code and you had unlimited money. Type in another and you couldn’t die. Within ten minutes I had everything. Every item, every upgrade, every locked thing unlocked. For about an hour I was a god in that world.

And then I was bored.

Not slowly bored. Immediately bored. I sat there with everything and realized there was nothing left to do, so I quit. Weeks later I started the same game again from zero, no codes this time, dying on the same level over and over, grinding for coins that took an afternoon to earn. By every measure it was worse. And I played it for months.

I didn’t understand that at the time. I just knew the version where I had everything was the version I didn’t want to play. It took me years to work out why.

What the cheat code actually took

Here’s what I eventually saw.

The cheat code didn’t give me the game. It deleted it.

When I typed in unlimited money, I didn’t just skip the grinding. I removed the reason to do anything at all. There was no goal left, and with no goal there was no road toward it. What I had left was a beautiful world with nothing to do in it — which, it turns out, is a fairly precise definition of boring.

Purpose and process are the same system. Purpose is the thing you’re moving toward. Process is the moving. You can’t have one without the other, and the enjoyment — the part that actually feels like being alive — lives almost entirely in the second one.

The cheat code was efficient. That was exactly the problem. It optimized away the only part that mattered.

A man who had nothing left

Viktor Frankl spent three years in Nazi concentration camps. He lost his wife, his parents, his brother, and a manuscript he’d spent years writing. He had no possessions, no freedom, and no reasonable expectation of surviving the week.

What he wrote about afterward wasn’t the suffering. It was who survived it. He noticed that the people who held on weren’t the strongest or the best fed. They were the ones who still had something ahead of them — a person to find, a book to rewrite, a thing left undone. When that went, they went, often within days. The line he kept returning to was Nietzsche’s, and it has stayed with me for years: he who has a why to live can bear almost any how.

I’m not comparing anyone’s life to a camp. I bring it up because it’s the cleanest evidence I know that the why is the load-bearing thing. Strip away every comfort a person has and they can still function, as long as the why is intact. Give a person every comfort and take the why, and they come apart in a much nicer room.

That’s the whole shape of it. A life without purpose isn’t a life that’s going badly. It’s a life that has quietly stopped being a life. Imagine waking up tomorrow and every day after with nothing you’re moving toward — nothing that needs you, nothing unfinished. Most people picture that and call it a holiday. Try to picture it lasting twenty years and something in you flinches.

The road is where you actually live

But here’s the part I care about most, and it’s the part almost nobody says out loud.

Purpose isn’t valuable because you reach it. It’s valuable because it produces a process — and the process is where your life physically happens.

Think about the arithmetic. Whatever you’re chasing right now, arriving at it will take a single afternoon. The road to it takes years. If satisfaction only lives at the finish line, then you’ve designed a life where roughly ninety-nine percent of it is waiting and one percent is living.

And the finish line moves anyway. You arrive, it becomes normal within a month, and you find yourself wanting something further out. That isn’t a flaw in you — it’s just what wanting does, and a person who stops wanting anything new hasn’t finished the game, they’ve stopped playing it. But it does mean that if the good part only lives at the finish line, you’ll spend your life almost entirely somewhere else.

Which is a long way of saying the finish line was never where the good part was kept.

You already know this from things that have nothing to do with achievement. The people who stay good at an instrument aren’t the ones who wanted to be good at it — they’re the ones who liked the practicing. The cook who gets better is the one who enjoys the chopping. Anyone who’s built something real will tell you the strange truth that the best part was somewhere in the middle, when it was still hard and still unfinished and nobody was watching yet.

The difficulty isn’t the tax you pay for the reward. A lot of the time the difficulty is the reward, wearing clothes you didn’t recognize.

That’s what the second run through the game taught me. Grinding for coins was slow and repetitive and I loved it, because every coin meant something. When the coins were free they meant nothing, and a world where nothing means anything is a world you close after an hour.

But most shortcuts are fine, actually

I need to stop here, because if you’ve read this far you’ve probably started arguing with me. Good. You should.

Because most shortcuts are obviously good. Nobody rubs two sticks together for fire. We use lighters, calculators, washing machines, maps that tell us where to turn. Human progress is largely a history of people finding cheat codes and everyone else gratefully typing them in. If skipping the hard part always destroyed something valuable, we’d all still be grinding our own flour, and we would not be better people for it.

So the rule can’t be “shortcuts are bad.” That’s a bumper sticker, not a thought.

The real distinction is what you wanted in the first place.

Some things you only want the outcome of. Clean clothes. A number added up. Getting across town. Nobody’s soul is nourished by the walk to the laundromat, and a machine that removes that walk has taken nothing from you — it’s given you your evening back. Take every shortcut you can find here. Take all of them.

But some things you wanted the doing of, even if you’d describe them as goals. Learning the instrument. Getting strong. Making the thing. Raising the kid. Nobody hires someone to play their video game for them, and if they did we’d all understand instantly that they’d missed the point — the point was never to have a completed save file. It was to be the person doing the completing.

The trouble is that these two categories look identical from the outside. Both are described as goals. Both have a finish line. And we’re fluent at spotting shortcuts but almost never stop to ask which kind of thing we’re shortcutting — so we take the efficient path through the parts of life that were never supposed to be efficient, and wonder why arriving felt so thin.

Ask it before you skip: do I want to have done this, or do I want to be the person who did it? If it’s the first, cheat freely. If it’s the second, the hard part is not in your way. The hard part is the thing.

And underneath all of that there’s a simpler version I keep coming back to.

We don’t call it a life. We call it living. A verb, in the continuous form — the grammar of something happening rather than something owned. You can shortcut your way to a noun, because a noun is a thing you either have or don’t. But you cannot shortcut a verb. Nobody asks for a faster way to dance. A shortcut through a dance is just not dancing. Skip to the end of a song and you haven’t saved four minutes, you’ve swapped music for silence.

Life sits in that category, and the word has been telling us so the whole time. It isn’t an object you’re trying to obtain before the deadline. It’s an activity you are in the middle of right now, and the middle is all there ever is.

So a shortcut through it was never going to hand you a faster life. It just hands you less of one.

The thing we most often mistake for a purpose

I should say the obvious one out loud, because it’s where most people meet this problem in real life.

Money isn’t a purpose. It’s a number, and a number has no content until you decide what it’s for — which means arriving at “a lot of it” with no answer to that question isn’t arriving anywhere. It’s the beautiful empty world again. Pointed at something, money turns into process: it buys the studio time, the treatment, the year you needed. Pointed at nothing, it’s a cheat code with better branding.

And the research here is more interesting than the version people repeat. You’ve probably heard lottery winners end up no happier than anyone else — that comes from a small study in the seventies, and the modern work doesn’t quite say it. Economists followed thousands of Swedish winners for up to twenty-two years and found the big winners genuinely were more satisfied with their lives, durably, no sign of it wearing off. But when they measured day-to-day happiness — how the hours actually felt — the effect mostly vanished.

That finding is the whole article in one line. Money reliably improved how these people scored their lives. It didn’t do much to how they lived them. The scoreboard went up and the days stayed roughly the same, which is precisely what a cheat code does: it changes your numbers and leaves you standing in the same room.

One caveat I won’t skip. If you’re in real financial difficulty, none of this is philosophy for you — it’s rent, a prescription, your kid’s school fees, and chasing it isn’t shallow, it’s responsibility. This was never about how much anyone should have. It’s about what it’s pointed at, which is a question you can ask at any income.

Would you still want to play?

I’ve stopped thinking of that game as a childhood story. It’s the clearest test I know.

The cheat code gave me exactly what I asked for — everything, instantly, with no road to walk to get there. And what it revealed is that I never wanted the everything. I wanted the going. I just couldn’t tell the difference until someone handed me the shortcut and I watched the whole thing collapse in an hour.

Life isn’t worth living because of what’s waiting at the end of it. It’s worth living because you have something to move toward, and because moving toward it fills your days with a reason to get up. The purpose gives the road a direction. The road is the part you actually get to live in.

And it doesn’t have to be a grand one. “Find your purpose” has paralyzed a lot of people, myself included, because it sounds like you’re supposed to produce a single answer big enough to cover a whole life. Nobody has that. You only ever need the next one — one thing worth walking toward from where you’re standing. That’s enough to put you back on a road, and the road is all you were ever going to get anyway.

So here’s the question I’d leave you with.

Whatever you’re working toward right now — if it landed tomorrow, all at once, complete, with nothing left to do — would you still want to play?

If the answer is no, it was never the thing you were after. It was the game.