Can You Still Be Happy When Your Dreams Don’t Come True?

How a TV sitcom taught me about our hopes and dreams and had me in a puddle of tears

They say the richest real estate on earth is a cemetery.

That’s where people are buried along with their million-dollar dreams. Either their dreams didn’t come true despite their years of toil and struggle; they just couldn’t make it happen; or worse, they never tried at all.

I wonder, did all those people die unhappier because what they wanted to do or achieve never materialized?

Can you still be happy when your dreams don’t come true?

Often the people around those with big aspirations suffer the most, and usually in silence. They get a front-row seat to their loved one’s years of hard work and disappointment. They see the toll it has.

It affects them personally too. When one partner suffers chronic stress, it puts undue strain on the relationship. Witnessing your loved one face countless heartbreak and rejection hurts you too.

Sometimes you don’t get a big break. Sometimes your project or personal goal fails and can’t be resurrected. And sometimes we don’t have much control over our successes.

As they say, that’s just the way the cookie crumbles.

How we resolve to pick up those cookie pieces with our next steps determines our happiness.

In other words, maybe the dream itself isn’t a source of happiness but what we do with it.

Let me explain.

In our hustle-heavy culture, there are a lot of people trying to make their thing big.

They want to go viral.

They want success.

They want the fulfillment of producing something that people love.

It’s noble.

We all have an innate human desire to impact the world in some way.

It’s also a tricky line to balance because if our dream can make us happy, the opposite is true too. Believing that “I’ll be happy/satisfied/fulfilled when” is dangerous territory to occupy.

The world is full of people leading grumpy, unhappy lives because they’re dissatisfied they didn’t reach their hopes and goals.

They mope, whine and take out their frustrations on those closest to them.

The more consumed they become with it, the higher the fall and deeper the pit if it doesn’t come to pass. Their identity almost becomes entwined with the dream.

Most people don’t know how to bypass this. What are they supposed to do?

The other night I watched a rerun of one of my favorite episodes of Young Sheldon. As I sat there for 22 minutes, crying my heart out, I was moved by the theme of the show: failed dreams.

I have empathy for people when they devote their entire life to pursuing something and it doesn’t materialize.

Shattered dreams are heartbreaking.

In the episode, on the night of the Nobel Prize ceremony, Sheldon’s mentor and Physics professor, Dr. Sturgis, was having a near-suicidal moment. He was dangerously up on a rooftop edge and needed a fair bit of coaxing to come down.

Finally, when he did, he admitted that it was also his dream to win the Nobel and that he most likely would never have that experience.

Gutted.

My heart breaks for those whose hopes never manifest.

It seems an easier solution would be to not bother at all. To avoid the pain and rejection by not going for the gold. Yes, that’s possible. But if we did, we’re missing the point of the dream.

Your dream is not just meant to be achieved

It seems counterintuitive but our dreams don’t exist merely to be achieved.

We tend to reflect on our lives with big, momentous occasions like graduations, buying our first car, getting married, a huge promotion, having a child, etc. These events stand out in our memories but they don’t define our lives because our lives are actually the sum of the little moments we live along the way.

We aren’t alive just to accomplish a big goal or master a specific craft.

Your life is marked by the tiny, unremarkable steps you’ve taken along the way as you pursue your goals.

The person we’re becoming is just as important, if not more important than the goal achieved when we reach the destination. It forces us to re-examine our motives.

So why are you after the thing you’re after? To get more wealth? Influence? Security?

Mind you, there’s nothing wrong with wanting any of that. Desiring to get a promotion in order to get out of debt or take a luxury vacation is actually quite honorable. Ambition can often be vilified and unfairly demonized when it shouldn’t be.

However, while you are plotting and working hard to attain the goals you’ve set for yourself, you should also make room for monitoring the person you’re becoming along the way.

Pay more attention to the person you’re becoming in the pursuit of the power, prestige, and pennies you desire because that person is just as, if not more important than the dream itself.

Is it affecting your health? Your mind? Your relationships? Is it becoming an all-consuming unhealthy obsession that’s affecting other parts of your life?

Basically, do you like the person you’re becoming?

We may often only realize years later in hindsight, that the reason we had the dream was to help shape the person we were supposed to become.

The person we become is our character. The pesky thing about your character is that it is only truly developed and revealed in adversity.

Your dream shouldn’t only be your end goal in life. If it is, then that’s a warning sign that the dream wasn’t really the “right” one to begin with.

Your dream isn’t the final destination. It’s a stepping stone to something else.

It would be wise to stop heralding your goal as the be-all, end-all, and allow for the possibility that whatever you want to be manifested could only serve as just the beginning.

That can only happen when you stop white-knuckling your goals.

All my childhood I dreamt of being a doctor. A pediatric cardiothoracic surgeon to be exact. The problem was I hated science.

I was a few months into a stressful load of the dreaded A-level trio of biology, math, and chemistry when I realized that I really wasn’t interested in anatomy and weird science experiments in the lab.

I was a hot mess every day I went to school. I decided to drop my A-levels and went to university on a scholarship to study something entirely different.

Looking back, I never would have found that other path, more suited to me, had I not dipped my toe into a future in medicine.

As lofty and unattainable as your dream might be, it might not be the only thing you were destined to do. It might be a precursor to a more fulfilling path.

An expensive dream

What you set your heart and mind on should invariably cost you something.

You will spend a lot of time, likely decades, chasing a lifelong dream. For some people, your dream might even outlive you (Martin Luther King Jr. comes to mind).

You will devote much of your talent and time to make the dream a reality. You’ll be mastering your abilities and working to become better than you ever thought possible.

Those aren’t the only costs.

What’s often overlooked though is the mental and emotional toil we go through. Most people don’t anticipate it because they don’t like to consider the inevitable setbacks along the way.

Once you accept the inevitable that you will experience blows, you’re more prepared to weather the storms and you could even enjoy the process along the way.

The reality is, your dream is not meant to be easy. It will cost you. The question is, is the price worth it to you?

The fulfillment vs happiness contradiction

Dr. Sturgis’s dream never came true and as a result, he wasn’t fulfilled.

We don’t know for sure whether we’ll get everything we want. We can only hope so and sometimes despite doing everything we can, that may not be the case.

You might never conceive a baby or earn $1million.

The point is to determine from the get-go that your happiness will not be from what you’ve fulfilled on your life resume.

Your life is happening right this second. It’s not when “XYZ” happens.

Redefine fulfillment as a life that’s happening right now, whilst you're on the way to the goal.

In Summary

• Be grateful for what you have along the way. A gift alone cannot give you joy, but only when it is combined with gratitude.
• Embrace ‘failure’ and enjoy the ride. Who you’re becoming along the way is more important than what you attain. Life is more about the moments in between than the big events we idolize.
• Remember, your happiness is determined by the daily pursuit of something that is meaningful to you, whether you reach it or not.