Hollow Success: Living Someone Else’s Dream

The corner office smells like expensive leather and the particular emptiness of achieved ambitions when you finally sink into the chair that cost more than some people’s cars, its surface cold against your back despite the warmth of congratulations still echoing in your ears. The city spreads below like a circuit board of ambition, each light representing someone else climbing toward their own corner office, their own hollow victory, and suddenly you understand that success is just another word for the distance you’ve traveled from the person you used to be.

The diploma on the wall mocks you with its Latin phrases that promised wisdom but delivered only credentials. Twenty years of strategic choices spread before your memory like a chess game played by someone else using your pieces, each move calculated to impress judges whose names you can no longer remember but whose approval you spent decades seeking. You realize you’ve been living your life in translation, converting your actual desires into a language that parents and teachers and society could understand, until you forgot what your original thoughts sounded like.

Success, it turns out, is a costume that fits everyone except the person wearing it. The salary that makes your college friends nod with envy tastes like copper pennies when you try to swallow your pride about earning it. The title that opens doors you never wanted to walk through sits on your business cards like a name that belongs to someone else, someone who shares your face but not your dreams. You have become a tribute act to yourself, performing the greatest hits of who everyone expected you to become.

The most devastating realization isn’t that you’ve wasted your life, but that you’ve succeeded brilliantly at wasting it according to someone else’s definition of brilliance. Every promotion was a step further away from the person who once stayed up all night reading poetry or building things with their hands or dreaming of small towns where everyone knew your name. You climbed the ladder with the dedication of someone who believed there was something worth finding at the top, only to discover that the view from here is of all the places you’ll never go.

Your achievements feel like evidence in a trial where you’re both the prosecutor and the defendant, each award and accolade marking another count of betraying the person you once promised yourself you’d become. The handshakes in the photos document the slow assassination of impulses that used to guide you toward things that made you feel alive rather than accomplished. You’ve traded every wild idea for a safe bet, every leap of faith for a calculated risk, every moment of potential transformation for the security of staying exactly who everyone expected you to be.

The money accumulates in accounts like sediment in a river that’s forgotten how to flow, funding a lifestyle engineered by focus groups of people who’ve never met you but somehow know better than you do what you should want. Your possessions tell the story of someone who reads the right magazines and makes the right choices and never lies awake wondering if there’s a version of themselves living a completely different life in some parallel universe where courage trumped convention.

But the cruelest part isn’t the discovery that you’ve been living someone else’s dream—it’s the realization that you’ve been doing it with such devastating competence that everyone, including yourself most of the time, believes this is what fulfillment looks like. You’ve become so skilled at performing satisfaction that you’ve convinced yourself the performance is real, until moments like this when the mask slips and you catch a glimpse of the face underneath.

The phone rings with another opportunity, another rung on the ladder that leads to an even more expensive office with an even better view of all the lives you’ll never live. Your hand hovers over the receiver, suspended between the person you’ve trained yourself to be and the person who’s been waiting decades for permission to exist. The choice spreads before you like a road splitting in a forest where one path leads deeper into the woods you know and the other disappears into territory that has no map, no guarantee, no promise except the possibility of becoming someone whose success belongs entirely to them.

Outside your window, the city continues its daily performance of ambition, each person below carrying their own version of this same weight, their own carefully constructed identity that may or may not belong to them. Somewhere in that maze of buildings is the job you might have taken if you’d been braver, the life you might have built if you’d trusted your own definition of what it means to succeed. The distance between this office and that life can’t be measured in blocks or years but only in the accumulated weight of a thousand small compromises that seemed reasonable at the time.

The leather chair creaks as you lean back, and for a moment you can almost remember what it felt like to make a decision based on desire rather than strategy, to choose something because it called to you rather than because it looked good on paper. That person feels both impossibly distant and startlingly close, separated from you not by time but by the courage to disappoint everyone whose approval built this prison of other people’s dreams.