9 ways modern life tricks you into believing you need things that actually make you miserable

I was standing in my apartment in Singapore, sunlight cutting across the stone floor in clean, expensive lines. Everything in the room had been chosen deliberately: the mid-century swivel chair flown in from Italy, the hand-finished leather, the art that suggested I was someone who knew how to live. The air was still. My phone was off. There was nothing to do but be here. And in that stillness, I felt it — a kind of ache I couldn’t name.

It wasn’t unhappiness, exactly. It was more like vertigo. Like I had climbed the wrong mountain and wasn’t sure when I took the wrong turn.

This is the part where I’m supposed to say that none of it made me happy. But that’s not quite true. It did make me happy — for a while. When the money started to come in, and I began to stretch out into a new kind of life, I felt like I was finally becoming who I was meant to be. Me, but unencumbered. Me, but better.

The watch was the first thing I bought that felt like a threshold. Not the Rolex — that came later. The Grand Seiko. It was heavy on the wrist in a way that made me feel settled, anchored. I told myself I liked it for the craftsmanship, the precision, the quiet elegance. And maybe I did. But I also liked what it said without speaking: I’ve arrived. I matter.

Looking back, I don’t think I ever believed that watch would fulfill me. But I did believe it would symbolize the fulfillment I was supposedly building toward — like a down payment on meaning. That was the trick. Modern life doesn’t offer lies. It offers beautifully packaged proxies. Objects, habits, identities that resemble fulfillment just enough to make you chase them.

I kept chasing.

At one point, I had five different tracking systems running. My time, my sleep, my workouts, my screen time, even my mood. I built dashboards. Optimized my mornings. Removed friction from my workflow. It all felt powerful — like I had finally wrestled life into submission. But over time, something strange began to happen: the more I optimized, the more hollow I felt. I was becoming efficient at living, but less alive.

That was the first crack: realizing that optimization had stopped being a tool and become a worldview. Every moment was something to be maximized, and anything that couldn’t be measured started to feel indulgent. Rest, joy, randomness — they didn’t fit into the system. So I stopped trusting them.

I didn’t know then that I was outsourcing my instincts to algorithms. That I was trading spontaneity for control. All I knew was that the dashboard looked good, and I didn’t.

And then came the hunger to be seen. Not just admired — understood. The paradox of online life is that you can build a version of yourself so convincing that even you begin to believe it. I crafted narratives. Carefully selected moments. Shared my insights. I told myself I was being vulnerable, but I was performing my inner life as content. I don’t blame myself for it. In a culture where attention is currency, we all learn to spend ourselves in ways that look like connection.

But deep down, I knew. I knew that the version of me being praised was more coherent than the real thing. That the truth was messier, needier, lonelier. And eventually, the applause started to feel like static — loud but meaningless. I could no longer tell whether I was being affirmed or just successfully mimicked.

I tried love, of course. Or something like it.

There was a period — I think of it now as a kind of spiritual fever — when I became convinced that what I needed wasn’t less, but one thing that was everything. A person who would mirror back the self I hadn’t yet managed to become. I looked for women who carried intensity in their silences. Women who felt psychologically textured, a little dark, a little hard to reach. It felt romantic, even noble: I want depth, not ease.

What I didn’t realize then is how easy it is to confuse depth with difficulty — and how quickly longing can become a way of avoiding yourself. The more mysterious she was, the more meaning I projected onto her. I wasn’t falling in love with someone. I was falling in love with the idea that someone else might redeem the incoherence I felt inside.

And like all mirages, it faded. Not in drama — just erosion. A quiet noticing that even intimacy had become another performance. Another structure to support a story of who I thought I was supposed to be. We talked about freedom. But what we meant was control.

When the relationships ended, I told myself I was fine. I doubled down on my life. Traveled. Worked. Created. The digital nomad fantasy had already rooted itself by then: movement as meaning, escape as evolution. If I didn’t feel right in one place, I simply moved to another. Bangkok. Lisbon. Saigon. I told myself I was building a life. But I was actually avoiding building a home — in myself or anywhere else.

There’s a certain misery in perpetual motion that you don’t notice until you stop. It’s not loneliness. It’s displacement. Like being in a long-term relationship with your own potential but never actually arriving. Everything is always just beginning. The next project. The next launch. The next revelation.

I remember arriving in Saigon once, walking into a bright, bare apartment I’d rented for the month, and feeling the sudden weight of my own illusion. I had freedom. I had time. I had money. And I had no idea what to do with any of it. I didn’t need more novelty. I needed roots. But I didn’t know how to plant them.

That’s another thing no one tells you: novelty is addictive precisely because it keeps you from sitting still. Stillness is dangerous. It’s where the truth creeps in.

So I stayed in motion. Built businesses. Built a life. Tried to become more of myself through ambition. But ambition is a strange mirror. It reflects back a distorted image — sharper, more polished, but somehow less real. And it keeps you reaching. Always reaching.

There’s a point where reaching becomes a kind of suffering. When wanting isn’t hunger anymore, but compulsion. I didn’t realize I had crossed that line until everything I touched — even the things I loved — began to feel like obligation.

And still, the world cheered me on.

That’s the thing: modern life will always applaud your performance, no matter how miserable it makes you. Especially if you look good while doing it.

Eventually, you run out of things to optimize.

You stop downloading new habit trackers. You stop trying to fix the way you sleep, or eat, or work, as if the next system might finally fix the part of you that still feels like it’s holding its breath. You stop reading articles about morning routines, or quarterly goals, or dopamine detoxes. You stop trying to get ahead of your own humanity.

I didn’t have a breakdown. I just got tired.

Tired of reaching. Tired of performing. Tired of chasing after things that only rewarded the most polished, controlled, and disconnected version of me. So I started listening to something else — not a guru, not a system. Just the raw silence I had spent years running from.

And in that silence, I began to notice how much I had confused deprivation for discipline. How much I had confused stimulation for vitality. How often I had said no to real pleasure and yes to performative struggle — because the latter looked more like “growth.”

There’s a specific kind of misery that hides inside things we’re praised for. The ambition. The busyness. The aesthetic of control. You can spend years earning that praise before you realize it was never meant for you — it was meant for the version of you that keeps the machine running.

There are still days when I want to buy something, post something, track something. When I find myself scrolling real estate listings not because I want to move, but because I want to imagine a life that feels more like mine than the one I’ve built. There are still days when I catch myself performing presence instead of living it.

But more often now, I don’t.

More often now, I make decisions that feel quiet. Not impressive. Not Instagrammable. Just mine. I say no and feel nothing collapse. I say yes and don’t need to explain it. I walk. I sit. I delete apps. I read things slowly. I leave conversations when they turn into theater. I let people misunderstand me.

I no longer need my life to look like a vision board.

It’s strange, the relief that comes from abandoning a fantasy. No one applauds it. No one sees it. But that’s the point.

The things I used to think I needed — the tools, the titles, the validations — they weren’t evil. They just weren’t built for peace. They were built to keep me moving. And for a long time, I mistook that movement for aliveness.

These days, the aliveness is different. It’s quieter. Less legible. But when it comes — often without warning, in the middle of a walk, or in the stillness between tasks — I know it’s real because it doesn’t demand anything from me. It just arrives.

Not to improve me. Not to perfect me.

Just to let me feel what it’s like to finally stop needing so much.