The other day, I allowed myself a pause after months of running endlessly, always working, always calculating survival in an unforgiving economy.

I sat still and thought perhaps I should give myself credit. The thought was seeded long ago, by a religious teacher in childhood, who warned that if one failed to express gratitude for God’s blessings, those blessings would eventually dry up.

Gratitude, I realized, isn’t just about faith. It’s about perspective.

Measured in money, my career feels modest. But measured in effort and achievement, it is the very thing I once dreamed of. Seven or eight years ago, this role would have felt unattainable.

I clawed my way here through relentless exams, through failures and recalculations. My wife often reminds me of the gap between my title and my paycheck, and I answer with a quip: even the Nawab of Bengal, Bihar, and Orissa, history tells us, was strapped for cash.

Prestige rarely pays as well as we imagine.

Getting here required a gamble, a sharp career turn decided almost on instinct. I had just two and a half months to prepare for the entry exam that would reset my path.

Those months were brutal. I was cut off from family and friends, buried in books and anxiety. To survive it, I built myself a ritual: every night before sleep, I imagined I was already there–already working, already part of that world.

Ten or fifteen minutes of disciplined daydreaming, reinforced by YouTube lectures, research papers, and small conversations about the field in Bangladesh. It was a form of meditation, though I didn’t call it that at the time.

Looking back, I see what I was doing. It was neither mysticism nor the cheap slogans of self-help influencers.

It was something closer to what Carl Jung called a descent into the unconscious, mixed with Viktor Frankl’s logotherapy: an attempt to give language and image to my deepest “why.”

Once articulated, that inner target began to quietly reorganize everything–my choices  and my habits. Even my resilience. Work that pulled me closer to the goal I repeated. Work that pushed me away, I abandoned.

People today might call it “manifestation” or the “law of attraction.” I don’t believe in magic. What I believe is that once you define your desire in clear words and images, you create a compass.

The rest is persistence and the willingness to live with uncertainty. And so today, I let myself feel grateful because the path does.

Importance of setting target

Without a target, life becomes drift. If you cannot articulate where you are headed, if vague impulses set your course, then every event, every plan, feels arbitrary.

You lose the capacity to judge what moves you forward and what pulls you back. You become, as in Dalí’s haunting image of boat-people pushed helplessly by the wind, a passenger calling drift “destiny.”

Seneca captured it with Roman precision: “If a man knows not to which port he sails, no wind is favorable.”

The same logic extends beyond personal lives into politics. In political struggle, victory must first be imagined before it is achieved. You have to picture yourself not only as the victor, but as a responsible steward of state power–deciding, even in advance, how resources will be deployed along ethical and social lines.

The late anthropologist David Graeber called this prefigurative politics: the act of embodying the future you fight for in the present.

Prefigurative politics is not naïve optimism or arrogance. It is a safeguard. It disciplines movements against the temptation to fetishize victory as an end in itself.

By imagining yourself already in power, you force yourself to confront the responsibilities that come afterward—and to align your current struggle with those future obligations.

But here lies the problem of our time: the very practice of setting goals, of building meaning systems, has corroded. To talk about ideals today feels utopian, even childish. Cynicism has hardened into a culture.

Technique has replaced vision. Cleverness and maneuvering are celebrated, while discussions about purpose invite ridicule. We’ve turned politics into a game of tricks rather than a contest of ideals.

Once, I jokingly called this the “BNP Senior Leader Syndrome.” Now that I see the same emptiness in newer parties too, I call it something broader–the “Bengali Realist Syndrome.”

I’ve seen this skepticism firsthand. When younger students once asked me for exam advice, I didn’t just underline chapters in red ink. I also tried to pass on Nietzsche’s hard-earned truth: “He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.”

Discover your “why,” I told them, and the “how” will follow. They hated it. “Brother,” they would protest, “forget all that and just mark the books.”

But that impatience is the essence of the problem: we want shortcuts to the “how” without ever clarifying the “why.”

And a society—or a politics—built on shortcuts can only drift.

Putting it into current context

I used to watch the same emptiness play out among the senior Facebook intellectuals of the BNP. Before even sketching a political project, their first reflex was always tactical: Will this lead to the fall of the Awami League?

They were so consumed by that single obsession that they never asked the harder questions: What would come after the fall? What kind of Bangladesh were they actually fighting to build?

Even now, one of their most influential voices insists this is not the time for ideals or narrative, only for promises of job creation and economic growth, as if a nation could be built on spreadsheets alone.

But this misses the very core of what a political narrative is supposed to do.

The role of ideology is not to produce policy bullet points but to make it credible that men like Mirza Fakhrul Islam, Mirza Abbas, or Tarique Rahman would set aside their own economic interests for the country’s.

Without a vision of what Bangladesh should become, the rhetoric of economic reform rings hollow.

And this is not just a BNP problem anymore. The same reduction of politics to methods and mechanics, to “how” without “why,” has infected newer parties as well. It is the same mindset I encounter in students who ask for exam advice.

They want me to underline chapters in red ink but resist any discussion of motivation, purpose, or the deeper “why” behind their chosen path.

They too are caught in the same loop of cleverness and technique, moving without direction.

That, to me, is the crisis of our time. We have shrunk both personal ambition and political struggle into questions of method and avoided the larger questions of purpose. The “why” has been exiled from our discourse.

Our future work must be to bring it back, to resist the temptation of pure instrumentalism, to challenge the obsession with tricks and tactics, and to restore meaning to the center of our collective and personal lives.

Without that, every wind feels favorable, and we drift exactly nowhere.

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Mikail Hossain is a writer and analyst