the art of outgrowing yourself

some thoughts on wanting and the evolution of our desires

I’m turning 36 this week so pardon me while I go through all the existential spirals ツ

---

I found myself scrolling through real estate listings this morning, lingering over photos of houses with giant yards and pools, imagining myself never having to leave such a sanctuary if I didn't want to. The irony struck me suddenly: here I was, in my mid-thirties, dreaming of domestic retreat while remembering how desperately my twenty-something self had wanted the exact opposite—visibility, elevation, the glittering spectacle of city life spread out below like a constellation of possibilities.

When I was twenty-four, I drove to Las Vegas with everything I owned crammed into a small car. The ambition was larger than the luggage. After working a series of random jobs that paid the bills but fed nothing deeper, I started my own marketing agency and slowly, impossibly, began to make it work. The dream I carried was specific and non-negotiable: a high-rise apartment with floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking downtown, where I could fall asleep watching neon lights blink their electric promises into the desert night.

And then it happened. I found myself living in a two-thousand-square-foot loft, open concept, the entire city laid out below me like a personal theater. Every night, I would stand at those massive windows and watch the light show—the Plaza blinking red and yellow, the casino marquees cycling through their rainbow advertisements, the distant mountains dark against the star-scattered sky. It was magical in the most literal sense: it felt like a spell had been cast, transforming a desperate wish into lived reality.

I remember the gratitude being almost overwhelming at first. Walking through my front door never became routine. That sweep of windows, that vista of ambition made manifest—it stopped me in my tracks every single day. And yet, even in the midst of this fulfilled dream, I could feel the familiar stirring of want. Maybe a higher floor. Maybe a bigger building. Maybe something more.

How quietly the fulfilled wish becomes the insufficient present.