Elon Musk's net worth, the last time I checked, was somewhere north of $300 billion. If he stopped working tomorrow and spent $10 million every day, it would take nearly 90 years to run through it. He is 54. He would not make it.
He is still working. Working hard, by all accounts. Building, acquiring, managing, fighting. The question that nobody seems to ask is: why?
It is not money. He has more than any human could spend in several lifetimes. It is not fame. He has been globally recognised for over two decades. It is not legacy. His companies have already changed multiple industries.
So what is it?
There is an Arabic word, hırs, that we use in Turkish. It means a fierce, almost uncontrollable desire to obtain something. But its root, harese, tells a more interesting story.
Camels in the desert eat thorns. The thorns cut the camel's mouth and it bleeds. The blood, mixing with the salty thorn, creates a taste the camel craves. So it eats more. Which causes more bleeding. Which creates more of the taste. The camel eats until it bleeds to death, unless someone intervenes.
That cycle, that feedback loop of desire feeding on its own consequences, is harese. And it is the etymological root of ambition in Turkish.
I have shipped over 25 projects. Some reached millions of users. Some failed quietly. The pattern I have noticed is this: the moment after launch, after the deployment succeeds and the first users arrive, there is a window of about 48 hours where I feel satisfied. Then the window closes.
Not because something went wrong. Because the act of completion removes the thing that was driving me. The pursuit was the point. The arrival is an anticlimax.
This is a common observation, almost a cliché at this point: the journey matters more than the destination. But clichés persist because they describe something real. The dissatisfaction is real. It sits in the gap between what I have built and what I can see should exist next.
The question I keep returning to is whether this is a feature or a bug. Dissatisfaction is the engine of ambition. Without it, I would not have built anything. I would have stopped after the first project, or the fifth, or the tenth. The feeling that something is not good enough yet is what pushes it closer to good enough.
But the same force that drives also erodes. It makes rest feel like laziness. It makes completion feel like failure. It turns every finished project into evidence of the next unfinished one.
I do not think there is a clean answer. The people who tell you to "be grateful for what you have" are not wrong, but they are not useful. Gratitude and dissatisfaction are not opposites. They coexist, awkwardly, in the same person on the same day.
The camel does not stop eating because someone explains that the thorns are hurting it. It stops because someone pulls it away. I have not yet found the equivalent of being pulled away. I am not sure I want to.