Why Success Feels Empty, The Truth High Achievers Ignore - VOTB

2 Be Better

Chris Burkett

Education, Self-improvement, Health & Fitness, Relationships, Society & Culture, Mental Health

4.8 • 1.2K Ratings

🗓️ 21 April 2026

⏱️ 62 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

This episode of The Voice of the Broken dives deep into a powerful and often overlooked psychological truth, why success can leave high achievers feeling empty, restless, and unfulfilled. Chris and his co-host break down a Psychology Today article on the “arrival fallacy,” exploring how the pursuit of goals triggers dopamine and purpose, while the achievement itself often falls flat. Through real-world examples like fitness, business, relationships, and personal discipline, they unpack the difference between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, and why tying your identity to achievement can quietly destroy your sense of self-worth. Beyond the psychology, the conversation expands into raw, unfiltered discussions about masculinity, purpose, financial pressure, freedom, social media burnout, and what success actually means in real life. You’ll hear honest takes on ambition versus fulfillment, the cost of chasing money, the importance of meaningful relationships, and how modern systems shape identity and perception. This episode is for anyone grinding toward goals, feeling stuck after reaching them, or questioning whether the life they’re building actually aligns with who they are. Expect real talk, uncomfortable truths, and a deeper perspective on purpose, identity, and what it really means to win.

Disclaimer: We are not professionals. This podcast is opinioned based and from life experience. This is for entertainment purposes only. Opinions helped by our guests may not reflect our own. But we love a good conversation.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome back, guys. We're doing another episode of The Voice of the Broken. My name is Chris. I'm here with my co-steady two tongues. What's up, everybody? We are going to be doing some articles today from psychology today. This is kind of the format for what we've been doing lately. The emails that we were getting for Voice of the Broken slowed down and the ones that we were getting were just trauma dumps. We weren't getting enough success stories. So we've moved on to other content that we hope you guys enjoy. And without further
0:24.2	ado, we're just going to jump into this. This one's called why high achievers can feel loss after
0:28.5	success. This says you work towards something for months, sometimes years, believing that when
0:34.8	you finally arrive, you'll feel different, calmer, happier,
0:37.8	more certain. Maybe it's earning the degree, getting the promotion, publishing the book, or
0:42.4	reaching a long-awaited milestone. And when that moment comes, you feel relief, pride, and
0:47.2	exhilaration, but for many high achievers, that feeling fades fast and is replaced by restlessness
0:53.5	and emptiness.
0:54.9	You think to yourself, why doesn't this feel the way I thought it would?
0:59.1	You got any thoughts on this before we get into the actual article in this person's opinion?
1:02.9	I feel like we kind of touched on this the other week.
1:06.0	Mount Everest.
1:06.9	Yeah.
1:07.9	It's about the climb.
1:10.0	Right?
1:10.5	Yeah.
1:10.8	We hyper fixate and we, we obsess and we research and we work and we grind and we're doing this thing because we want the work and the purpose. So like the Mount Everest thing, this isn't about peaking or summiting. This is about the preparation that goes into it and the actual
1:29.5	journey to get us to the peak. And most of the time when people get to the top of the thing,
1:34.0	like it's a cool view and you just start all that work and all that months of preparation
1:37.0	or years and you're ready to like celebrate this victory and you realize that now you have
1:41.9	nothing to look forward to. So we go from,
1:45.1	oh shit, we did it to, okay, what's next? It's not simply enough to just obtain the summit,
	...

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