The Cat and the Mountain

On fear, ambition, and what it means to finally be alive

“Here we go again,” she said.

“What do you mean?”

“You and your mouth tape and your breath science. Aren’t you tired of following rules so you can optimise everything?”

“What are we here for then?” I said. “Aren’t we here to grow and become better versions of ourselves?”

“Yes,” she said. “But you do it too much. It’s relentless.”

I didn’t have an answer. I went to bed with tape over my mouth and lay there in the dark, breathing through my nose, wondering if she was right.

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I’ve been listening to James Nestor on breath, tracking my running splits, monitoring my sleep, and reading about healthspan and oxygen efficiency.

I cracked 5K last week. My snoring is less. The systems work. So what is the problem?

The problem, I’ve come to suspect, isn’t the tape.

It’s the compulsion underneath it.

Frankl’s Inverse Law ¹ states that when people cannot easily access joy, they overinvest in meaning, productivity, and self-improvement as a form of compensation.

The drive isn’t virtue. It’s avoidance. Meaning becomes a coping mechanism. If you struggle to feel ease, you chase achievement. If you can’t relax, you optimise. If you sense an existential void beneath the surface of your days, you fill it with output and forward motion.

When I first heard this, I dismissed it. Then it settled. Then it landed like something true I didn’t want to admit.

Fear has always been my primary fuel. Even when the business is doing well, I’m afraid it will collapse. Even when I write something good, it isn’t good enough. Even when I win at Padel, I feel as if I’m lucky. I live like an imposter, always one quiet Tuesday away from being found out.

A rat is more motivated by the cat behind it than the food in front. I have spent years running from that cat — and calling it ambition.

The trap is elegant in its cruelty. Because the running works. The metrics improve. The body gets stronger. The business grows. The output accumulates. And you look, by every visible measure, like a man who has his life together.

And so the behaviour is continually rewarded, the avoidance is never named, and the void — the original thing you were fleeing — remains perfectly intact beneath all that forward motion.

Life becomes one long marshmallow test.

Gratification later.

Rest later.

Joy later.

Once the next milestone is hit, once the numbers look right, once I’m finally enough — then I can relax.

Work becomes the default setting. Leisure feels suspicious. Stillness feels like laziness. And somewhere in the accumulation, you forget what you were trying to feel.

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If not meaning, or achievement or hedonism, then what are we here for?

I keep returning to this word: aliveness.

Most of us aren’t depressed — we’re under-alive. We confuse pleasure with vitality and productivity with purpose, yet neither guarantees that electric sense of being here.

Aliveness arrives in flashes: after effort, in awe, in creation, in honest connection, in the quiet pride of becoming slightly more than we were yesterday.

The real danger isn’t failure; it’s drifting into a life where nothing stirs the soul.

Aliveness is not happiness. Happiness is often passive — something that arrives in the absence of difficulty. Aliveness is something else. It’s the quality of being fully present inside an experience, with your whole self engaged.

It’s what I feel in the middle of a brutal rally on the padel court, not narrating myself from above but simply inside the game. It’s what I felt on a mountain in Peru, watching the sky burn orange above clouds I’d never seen from below. It’s what I feel at the end of a piece of writing that cost me something — not just the satisfaction of completion, but the sense that something real passed through me.

Happiness alone feels shallow. Suffering alone feels masochistic. Growth alone feels like what I’ve been doing. And it’s exhausting.

What I’m slowly understanding is that progress is not the enemy. Discipline is not the enemy. Curiosity, ambition, the desire to improve — none of these are the problem.

The problem is what they’re in service of. When every arena becomes a courtroom — the business, the sport, the writing, the fatherhood — and you are simultaneously the prosecutor and the accused, growth becomes a trial you can never win. Your worth is always pending the next verdict.

“I am enough” doesn’t mean stop growing. It means your value is not on trial while you grow.

That’s the shift I’m trying to make. I won’t pretend I’ve made it.

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At 57, I don’t think I need the cat behind me anymore.

I need the mountain in front.

Not to prove anything. Not to compensate for some hollow place I haven’t dealt with. Not to optimise myself into a better version that finally deserves to exist.

But to experience.

To build and create because creation is one of the most alive things a human being can do.

To feel awe — not because I scheduled it, but because I showed up fully awake.

The deepest growth left might not be another metric. It might be learning how to expand without self-punishment. To pursue progress without panic. To work without worshipping work. To breathe — taped or untaped — without believing that my value depends on the results.

Most nights, I still go to bed with tape over my mouth. She doesn’t say anything anymore. Maybe she’s waiting to see if I’ve understood something. I’m not sure I have — not fully. But I think the question has changed. And maybe that’s where it starts.

We are not here to endlessly delay joy in the name of meaning.

We are not here to anaesthetise ourselves with pleasure either.

We are not here merely to grow.

We are here to be alive.

And perhaps the real discipline — the hardest discipline, the one no app measures — is learning to stop putting your worth on trial while you do it.

1. Popularised by Chris Williamson.