From Red Porsche to Bliss: Rethinking Goals, Identity, and Free Will

 Many leaders secretly run on a simple script:

“If I get there, then I’ll be happy.”

There is always a “there”:

• The promotion.
• The exit.
• The partner.
• The red Porsche.
• The healed body.
• The next spiritual milestone.

The logic is linear:

1. Define a goal.
2. Reach the goal.
3. Experience a burst of happiness.
4. Repeat.

You know how this goes. The burst is short. The question “What now?” arrives faster than expected. The next goal appears. The treadmill keeps moving.

There is another way to live and lead.

Happiness vs Bliss: two different games

It helps to distinguish two words that often get blurred:

• Happiness
• Bliss

Happiness is what you feel when a desired state is reached:

• “When I’ve hit that revenue number, I’ll be happy.”
• “When I’ve found the right person, I’ll be happy.”
• “When I’ve finally left this job, then…”

This type of happiness:

• Appears in short bursts.
• Quickly fades as a new lack appears.
• Is always preceded by a period of perceived deficiency.

Bliss (Ananda) is different.

It is the quality you see in a small child playing:

• Building a sandcastle.
• Pushing toy cars.
• Completely absorbed in the process.

The joy is not in the finished castle or the number of laps completed. It is in the act of playing itself.

Bliss is:

• Not tied to reaching a state.
• Not reliant on correcting a perceived lack.
• A spontaneous delight in the fact that this moment exists at all.

This distinction isn’t philosophical hair‑splitting. It is the difference between a life organised around constant lack and a life organised around presence.

How goals create lack (even when they “work”)

The moment you define a goal, you also create:

“I am not there yet.”

You can be objectively well‑resourced – money in the bank, recognition, health – and still feel poor because your mind has picked a higher target and decided “this is what I should have now.”

Defining a goal sounds harmless. But embedded in it is a structural message:

• “This is missing.”
• “This should already be here.”
• “As long as this is not achieved, something is wrong.”

Even if you reach the goal, the mechanism doesn’t change. It just picks another target.

On the level of mood and self‑perception, this is exhausting.

On the level of identity, it’s corrosive.

Acceptance vs embracing: why “put up with it” isn’t enough

A natural counter‑move is to say:

“Okay, I’ll just accept things as they are.”

But there is a crucial difference between:

• Acceptance
• Full embracing

Acceptance can still carry resistance underneath:

• “I accept that my partner left me, but I’m against it.”
• “I accept that I’m ill, but I hate it.”
• “I accept this project failed, but I can’t stand it.”

You’re not openly fighting reality. But inside you still label it as wrong.

Full embracing goes further:

• It is taking the moment exactly as it is, without adding “this is good/bad” on top.
• There is no internal argument layered onto the fact.

From this place:

• The body may be ill.
• The relationship may be over.
• The balance sheet may be red.

All of that is still true. But it is no longer framed as an error.

As soon as you judge:

• “This is good; I must keep it.”
• “This is bad; I must change it.”

…you are back inside the goal mechanism: trying to maintain or fix, driven by lack.

Embracing doesn’t mean you become passive or indifferent. It means you stop adding an internal war to external facts.

Absurdly extreme, but clarifying

To feel the difference, imagine the most extreme situation you can think of.

For example:

• Being burned at the stake.
• Drinking a cup of poison, knowing it will end your life.

History gives us a few images of people who did exactly that without visible panic or resistance.

This is not about glorifying martyrdom. It is to point at an inner possibility:

• To relate to even the most extreme moment without frantic valuation.
• To say “yes, this too” even there.

You may never be tested that way.

But your nervous system runs similar patterns in milder scenes every day: a bad email, a loss, a change, a diagnosis.

Practising non‑valuation there is already a stretch.

Where you anchor identity determines how much you suffer

Underneath goals and valuation sits a more basic question:

“Who do you think you are?”

Most of us anchor identity in:

• What we have – house, income, status, physical attractiveness.
• What we think and feel – the inner voice and emotional flow.
• Our body – youth, shape, health.

Each of these anchors is:

• Temporary.
• Volatile.
• Guaranteed to change.

If your sense of self is fused with possessions, what happens when they are gone?

If your sense of self is fused with your body, what happens as it ages or fails?

If your sense of self is fused with the stream of thoughts in your head, what does a moment of real silence mean?

When identity is small and fragile, the world is full of threats.

The “How are you?” trap

Everyday language reinforces this.

“Hi, how are you?”

Easy question on the surface. Hidden inside is:

• A specific “you” being referenced.
• A small, assumed identity.

We rarely stop to ask:

• “Who exactly is being addressed?”
• “Who is this ‘I’ that is supposed to answer?”

But the way you answer – internally and externally – depends on:

• Whether you answer as a body.
• As a cluster of stories and thoughts.
• As the sum of your possessions.
• As a soul.
• As something larger than all of that.

Same question. Completely different answers.

From leaf to forest: widening the “I”

A simple metaphor here is the leaf and the forest.

• As a leaf, you are very vulnerable:
• Weather, parasites, seasons.
• When you wither, it’s over.
• As a tree, you are less fragile:
• Individual leaves come and go.
• The tree continues.
• As a forest, you see more:
• Trees die, new ones grow.
• The forest, as a system, persists.

Widen the metaphor to humanity, the planet, the universe.

• As a small separate self, every loss is absolute.
• As a larger identity, individual losses are still felt, but they sit in a wider understanding of cycles.

This is not a trick to avoid feeling. It is a way to see that:

The more inclusive your identity, the less any single event can completely define you.

Attachment to the impermanent: why it hurts

Everything in the manifest world – people, bodies, roles, companies, species, planets – is transient.

If you cling to any of these as your ultimate anchor, you are building your house on sand.

This is tragic from the point of view of the clinging self.

From a wider perspective, it is also elegant:

• A constant dance of arising, persisting, dissolving.
• A system that never stops moving.

Bliss does not come from denying the pain of endings. It comes from gradually learning to identify with a “you” large enough to hold both the pain and the beauty.

Karma and the “secret shortcut” (identity again)

Take the concept of karma.

Standard reading:

• You (or your soul) did things.
• Those actions created debts.
• You must experience certain things (possibly across lives) to “balance the account.”

Within that frame, it makes sense to:

• Talk about working off personal karma.
• Consider inherited karma (family, ancestors).

An alternative view is to ask:

“Who owns the karmic account?”

If the account belongs to a very small identity:

• “I, this person, did X to that person,”
  then you and the other have separate ledgers.

If you expand identity to:

• “We, as one larger entity,”

then some debits and credits can net out at that new level.

Push this farther:

• At the level where you genuinely identify with everything, there is nowhere for karma to stick. There is no “other” to balance accounts with.

This isn’t a loophole to avoid responsibility. It simply points to:

• Karma, too, is entangled with identity.
• Change the scale of “I,” and the relevance of karma changes.

Free will as perspective choice

Discussions about free will often get abstract:

• “Do we have any at all?”
• “Is everything determined?”

In this context, free will can be seen much more practically:

“From which level of identity am I going to respond?”

You have some choice about whether to:

• Answer “How are you?” as a stressed manager or as a broader being.
• Interpret events from a tight, personal frame or from a wider, systemic one.
• Stay inside the cultural script or experiment with another way.

You are not forced to stay at one level. You might not yet know all the floors, but once you hear the staircase exists, even choosing not to explore it is, in a sense, a choice.

The Trabi, the Lamborghini, and social compatibility

Another metaphor:

• A small car (Trabi) with 30 horsepower – standard human coping capacity.
• A tuned engine with 3000 horsepower – expanded awareness, more “shamanic horsepower.”

You can:

• Put a massive engine into a car that looks like any other Trabi.
• Drive 30 km/h in a 30‑zone and blend perfectly with everyone else.
• Know privately that you could go much faster when the context is right.

This raises an uncomfortable tension:

• If you show your 3000‑horsepower engine (different perceptions, unusual peace, expanded capacities), others may reject or push you out.
• If you never show it, you remain socially compatible, but permanently underused.

There’s no one correct answer.

What matters is:

• Knowing what kind of engine you actually have.
• Being able to choose, consciously, when to drive at 30 and when to explore the racetrack.
• Recognising others who are “Trabis on the outside, Lamborghinis under the hood.”

Over time, as more people upgrade their engines and recognise each other, norms can shift.

What this means for how you lead

None of this requires you to quit, to move to a monastery, or to pretend you don’t care about outcomes.

It does invite you to experiment with:

1. Softening the grip of goals
• Notice when you are defining yourself through lack.
• Ask, “What if I could relate to this moment without needing it to be different first?”
2. Practising non‑valuation in small moments
• Start where stakes are low: traffic, weather, minor inconveniences.
• See what happens when you drop “good/bad” and just see “this is what is happening.”
3. Expanding your “I” on purpose
• When something hurts, try answering “How am I?” from different levels:
• As a body.
• As a mind.
• As a member of a family, a team, a country.
• As part of a much larger field.
• Notice how the experience shifts.
4. Respecting your engine
• Acknowledge any inner development you have done.
• Be honest: where are you still driving 30 because you’re afraid of being seen?
• Where might it be time to carefully explore more of your horsepower?
5. Letting others have their path
• Some people will never look beyond the bungalow.
• Others want to stay focused on karmic accounting.
• Others will aim for complete identity expansion.
• All of these are allowed.

Free will, in this framing, is less about choosing between predetermined options and more about discovering how many places you can genuinely stand inside yourself.

The red Porsche may still arrive. The point is that your sense of who you are – and your capacity for Bliss – does not hinge on whether it ever does.

(This article was inspired by a Conscious Conversation with a dear friend & professional colleague on 27th September 2024.)(ID:CO|AF)