The harder you chase something, the more it slips away. Let go of the fixation, though, and what you want has a way of finding you on its own.
True having is never about possession — it isn’t even about having at all. The way I see it, to truly have something is to not have it.
We start craving presents as children. If your parents promised to buy you something a few days from now, I’m sure you — like every kid — lay awake at night buzzing with excitement. But once the present was in your hands, a few days of play was all it took. The novelty wore off, you took it for granted, and you wanted the next one — a better one, something you’d never had before.
The same script plays out in adulthood. When you have ten thousand, you dream of a hundred thousand. Once you have a million, a million feels like nothing, and you want more.
Money, in the end, exists to buy products and services. But once we have enough of it to buy whatever we want, the same childhood psychology kicks in: a few days later, the thrill is gone.
Everyone wants a grand mansion. But I’d bet that once you actually own one, the happiness lasts weeks, maybe months — never a lifetime. Soon enough you grow bored of it, take it for granted, maybe even resent how much floor there is to clean, and catch yourself missing the little house you grew up in.
Why does a thing lose its pull the moment it becomes ours? Because as long as we don’t have it, our imagination paints it in its most ideal form — and an ideal, by definition, is flawless, woven entirely from beautiful notions. So everything, people included — the luxury car, the private jet, the person you long to call your own but can never win — exists in its most perfect state precisely when it is not yours.
How many people who finally won the love of their dreams didn’t, in time, come to take that person for granted? Whereas if you never won them at all, then perhaps at sixty or seventy the image of them you’ve built in your mind will still be the most beautiful, most tender, most captivating person in the world.
Choosing not to possess doesn’t mean giving up the drive to strive. What matters more is accepting, with grace, the ending where you chase your dream and fall short. To be human is to have ideals, and the whole point of striving is to realize them. But even if the dream never comes true, at least we will have carried it with us and lived out this life at peace with ourselves.
Since I can never have you, then stay in my mind — and be the one thing in all this universe that exists nowhere else!
Let me close with youth: no one gets to have their youth and the feeling of it at the same time. Only after we’ve grown up — long past the line that divides youth from adulthood — does it dawn on us, too late, that we never cherished it while we had it.
I miss elementary school, middle school, and my high school years. They live in my memory now, and my memory chooses to keep only the loveliest fragments of my life. Wait — I can recall the painful fragments too. How does that work?
So that’s it: the memories of setbacks and pain are themselves the indispensable pieces — the very ones that complete the puzzle of the life we have now…
Lunar New Year wishes from the other side of the world
Zhengyang Yao
Santa Clara
February 14, 2026
