Work and acquiring have no natural stopping point built in

Almost nothing in ordinary life will tell you when you have arrived, so the signal has to be supplied by you.

Some activities end by themselves. A meal ends, a book ends, a journey arrives. Others have no terminating condition at all: there is always a further improvement available, a further item, a further increment of the same. Work is like this in most forms. So is acquiring, so is refining, so is the perpetual tidying of systems that were already fine. In the absence of an internal stop, the activity continues until something external interrupts it, and external interruptions are usually unwelcome and badly timed.

The consequence is a peculiar kind of dissatisfaction that has nothing to do with the level achieved. You can reach a state you would once have considered excellent and feel nothing, because the comparison at hand is never the old state, it is the next one. The reference point travels with you. This is not a character flaw and it is not unique to anyone. It is what happens when a process without a defined endpoint runs on a mind that reads progress by comparison.

So the endpoint has to be installed deliberately, in advance, while you are still calm and not in the middle of it. Not as a limit on ambition but as a definition of arrival: a level, a state, a description specific enough that you would recognise standing in it. Without one, the honest answer to when will this be enough is never, and never is a strange thing to have accidentally chosen. With one, the same effort continues but it now has a destination rather than only a direction.