Strip away the specific form a want takes, the job title, the car, the relationship, and a pattern emerges underneath nearly every desire a person has ever chased.
There is the want of becoming something, an engineer, a doctor, someone respected, which produces a sense of accomplishment read as happiness. There is the want of doing something, to study, to build, to create, where success in the doing produces something closer to peace. There is the want of acquiring something, material comforts, sensations, the company of good people.
And then there is a fourth category almost nobody notices, hiding underneath the other three the entire time. The want to simply be a certain way. Balanced. Composed. Peaceful. Contented. This is the quiet final experience sitting behind everything else, and most people go their entire lives without ever spotting it directly, mistaking the first three categories for the whole story when they were only ever the means.
Test this against an actual memory. A goal was reached, something genuinely wanted, achieved after real effort. What was the feeling underneath the achievement itself. Very often it wasn't the object or the milestone that mattered. It was a brief window of being undisturbed, settled, at ease, before the mind moved on to whatever came next.
That settled state is what all the other wanting was actually chasing. Becoming, doing, and acquiring are the visible strategies. Being at peace is the target they were always aimed at, and the moment that becomes visible, a lot of frantic pursuit starts to look unnecessary. Not because wanting things is wrong, but because the actual object of the want was never the thing itself.