Can achieving goals feel demotivating?

Maybe it's because it did feel like that that I started asking myself all these existential questions. Because the thing with pursuing goals is that you kind of go from, "Oh my God, I've achieved the goal," to, "Oh my God, I've achieved the goal. What now?" And I think I did have a moment when I was at Microsoft where I just saw the many working years in front of me just stretching out into the future like this endless valley. And, I don't know, just the nature of those, the time, just the stretch of those years, it really hit me because I think up to that point, I didn't really have a sense of time because it was this constant levelling up. It's like, "I've got to hit this goal and then this goal and then this goal, and then this goal," and it was a bit like playing a computer game, you're just kind of chasing the next thing.

But then I'd go to a point where the next thing was it was just more of the same for a very, very, very long time. And certainly, yeah, these existential questions crept up of like, "Wait, hang on a minute. What am I doing?" It's a bit like when you play a game and then you've sort of reached a bit of a plateau where you've kind of completed the campaign or something and you're like, "I've been playing this for a while." Is there anything else I'm missing? You're like, "I think I'm thirsty. I probably haven't eaten in like days." Is that kind of sentiment. You sort of wake up from these days and you start to wonder what you're doing.