The Number That Never Arrives

Name your number.

Not out loud. Not yet. Just let it surface—the figure you've carried in some quiet fold of your mind, the amount that would finally mean safety. The sum that separates the life you're living from the life you imagine.

Everyone has one. The barista has one. The surgeon has one. The billionaire checking futures on his phone at 4am has one too, and it's higher than yours, and it doesn't help him sleep either.

I found mine at three in the morning, staring at the ceiling, running calculations I'd run a hundred times before. Fifty thousand dollars. That was the threshold. Cross it, and the anxiety dissolves. Cross it, and the future stops being a threat.

I crossed it. I want you to know what happened next.

Nothing.

No—something. The number changed. Fifty became seventy-five. The goal posts packed themselves up and moved while I wasn't watching. The anxiety remained. It just updated its demands.

This is the first truth about money: the number never arrives. You can chase it your whole life and never reach it, because it isn't a destination. It's a direction. It's the horizon line—always visible, always receding, always exactly as far away as you are from peace.

There's a light at the end of a dock on Long Island, and it has been blinking for a hundred years.

F. Scott Fitzgerald put it there in 1925, in a novel about a man who believed what you believe: that the number arrives. That if you work hard enough, want badly enough, accumulate enough, you will finally reach the place where wanting stops.

Jay Gatsby throws parties for hundreds of strangers. He owns shirts imported from England—silk, flannel, fine cotton—so many shirts that when he shows them to the woman he loves, she weeps at the sheer abundance of them. He has a mansion, a car, a name he invented for himself because his real name, James Gatz, sounded too much like where he came from.

And every night, he stands at the edge of his property and stares across the water at a green light.

The light sits on Daisy Buchanan's dock. Daisy is the woman Gatsby lost, the woman he's spent five years trying to win back. His entire fortune is a machine designed to produce one outcome: Daisy, returned to him, the past revised.

Can't repeat the past?" he says when someone suggests this is impossible. "Why of course you can!

He's not being naive. He's being American. He's articulating the central promise of this country: that the past is not a prison, that you can become anyone, that money is the solvent that dissolves all obstacles. Gatsby believes in the green light the way a pilgrim believes in God.

And here's what Fitzgerald shows us, the thing that makes the novel immortal: Gatsby gets what he wants. Daisy comes to his parties. Daisy begins an affair with him. Daisy looks at his shirts and weeps. The dream, against all odds, materializes.

Watch Gatsby's face in that moment:

There must have been moments even that afternoon when Daisy tumbled short of his dreams—not through her own fault, but because of the colossal vitality of his illusion.

Even in the moment of arrival, he feels the disappointment. The real Daisy cannot compete with the Daisy he invented during five years of wanting. Achievement is smaller than anticipation. It always is.

Fitzgerald kills Gatsby shortly after. A bullet in a swimming pool, a funeral almost no one attends. The parties meant nothing. The shirts meant nothing. The green light keeps blinking, indifferent, unreachable, after the man who reached for it is gone.

We beat on. That's the American condition. Rowing toward a light that recedes with every stroke.

The current isn't the economy. It isn't bad luck. It isn't the system, though the system is happy to profit from your rowing. The current is you. The current is the part of you that moves the goal posts, that updates the number, that arranges things so arrival is always tomorrow, never today.

You are the reason the number never arrives. And until you understand that, you'll spend your whole life on the water.

Edith Wharton understood this from the inside.

Fitzgerald watched the rich from a distance—the poor boy from Minnesota pressing his face against the glass. Wharton was born behind the glass. She grew up in old New York money, the kind that didn't need to prove itself because proving things was vulgar. She knew the wealthy as only a prisoner knows her cell.

Her novel *The House of Mirth* follows Lily Bart, a woman of the upper class with one fatal flaw: she doesn't have quite enough money.

Not by any reasonable standard. Lily lives well. She wears the best clothes, attends the best parties, summers in the right places. But her income is perhaps ten thousand dollars a year, and in her world—the world of Gilded Age society—that makes her precarious. She's comfortable enough to be ruined by the gap between what she has and what she needs.

So Lily calculates her number. Four hundred thousand dollars. That's the sum that would make her safe. That would free her from dependence on wealthy friends, from the exhausting performance of maintaining position, from the slow suffocation of being almost-but-not-quite.

Then something happens. A decent man falls in love with her.

Lawrence Selden isn't rich by Lily's standards. He's a lawyer, comfortable but not wealthy. He offers her something money cannot buy: genuine companionship, intellectual partnership, a life outside the gilded cage. He sees her clearly—her intelligence, her wit, her drowning—and he loves what he sees.

Lily refuses him.

Not because she doesn't feel anything. She does. Perhaps he's the only person she's ever really loved. But the number. The four hundred thousand. Selden can't provide it. And surely, Lily thinks, someone better will come. Someone richer. Someone who can give her the number *and* the life.

That someone never comes.

Wharton follows Lily's decline like a coroner documenting a death. Each compromise leads to another. Each bet fails. The money she chased destroys her—not by its absence, but by the chasing itself. The pursuit ate her life.

She dies in a boarding house, clutching a bottle of sleeping medicine, surrounded by the arithmetic that killed her. She never reached the four hundred thousand. She never would have. The number was never the point.

Modern psychology calls this the hedonic treadmill.

You adapt. Whatever you achieve becomes your new normal. The raise that felt transformative in January feels insufficient by June. The house that seemed like a dream becomes, within months, just where you live. The number that promised everything delivers only a new number.

Researchers document this relentlessly. Lottery winners return to their baseline happiness within a year. Paraplegics return to theirs. We are adaptation machines, built to incorporate and move beyond, designed never to arrive.

The cruelest part: knowing this doesn't help. Tell someone about the hedonic treadmill and they'll nod, understanding perfectly. Then they'll go back to chasing. The knowledge is powerless against the machinery.

Because the machinery isn't rational. It's not trying to make you happy. It's trying to keep you moving. From evolution's perspective, satisfaction is dangerous. The satisfied don't strive. The content don't compete. The arrived don't reproduce.

You're running on a treadmill designed by millions of years of survival pressure, and the treadmill's purpose is to ensure you never stop running. Your happiness was never the point.

So what do we do?

Not accept this. Not "make peace" with the treadmill, which is just another way of staying on it. Not optimize our running, which misses the question entirely.

We do something harder. We ask why.

Why do you need that number? Not the practical reasons—everyone has practical reasons. The deeper why. What would change in you if you reached it? What wound are you trying to heal? What voice are you trying to silence?

Gatsby wasn't reaching for Daisy. He was reaching for a version of himself that could finally stop reaching. A James Gatz who had proved himself, vindicated himself, become worthy at last.

Lily wasn't reaching for four hundred thousand. She was reaching for safety—not financial safety, but the safety of being unassailable, beyond judgment, finally enough.

The number never arrives because the number is a proxy for something money cannot provide. It's a substitute for belonging, for worthiness, for the feeling that you are finally, permanently okay.

No sum delivers that. The zeroes keep multiplying and the feeling stays the same. The only way out is through—through the number, into the wound beneath it, toward the question that money was never going to answer.

Why do you believe you're not enough already?

That's where the real work lives. That's what Fitzgerald and Wharton were pointing toward, through all those pages of parties and bankruptcies and green lights blinking in the dark.

The number never arrives. But you might.