Fulfilment was described as a positive, desirable state, based on the concept of a substantial improvement over present circumstances. Fulfilment involves feeling very good on a regular basis. Concept of fulfilment may be especially, notoriously prone to show false permanence. In practice, people feel good sometimes and bad sometimes. But when they create concept to imagine fulfilment, they tend to focus on feeling good all the time and not feeling bad at all. Fulfilment seems to mean permanent positive affect.
It is clear that false permanence is essential to our cultures featured ideals of fulfilment. Love, for example, is idealised as a permanent and unchanging state and that is how it is presented in popular movies and other media of the popular culture. The promise of eternal, and undying love is the cliche of popular romance. In practice, the passionate attraction of romantic love is of limited duration, and no one lives happily ever after, although people do manage to be fairly content and satisfied much of the time. Passionate love is a natural high, and altered state of consciousness, unlike most other states it is highly impermanent.
Likewise, people imagine that success in work will bring them constant happiness. One well-known study concluded that many men's ideas about success have almost a fairytale quality to them (Levinson, 1978.). The men felt that if they could only achieve a certain level of success, all their problems, worries, and hassles will the vanish. In many cases, the midlife transition or a crisis is brought on by reaching one's career goals only to have the disillusioning realisation that lives are there in negative features do not vanish.
The story of lotus eaters from Homers Odyssey is one of the gratest myth of fulfilment . In this story, Odysseus ship landed at an island where the inhabitants would simply sit around all day eating some lotus flowers that grew there wild. Once they started eating these flowers, the man felt very happy all the time. Some of the soldiers decided to stay on the island indefinitely. Odysseus had to drag them forcefully back to the ship and sail away with them. The lotus eaters myth expresses the notion that one could discover some substance that would make one feel good forever. It is always portrayed as dangerously seductive, although the danger seems mainly to be the loss of interest in anything else. Drugs carry the same promise of feeling good all the time and people who use them sometimes lose interest in other activities. Many of the objections to drug use are based on the argument that the loss of interest in other things (such as work) will be harmful in the long run.
Another myth, the story of Faust, also uses that to make a point about false permanence. According to the best known version of the story (Goethe), Faust makes a bargain with the devil: the devil will offer him earthly pleasures until he finds something so satisfying that he wants the present moment to last at which point the devil may claim Faust soul. Faust is a mature and learned man, and he has come to see that all forms of satisfaction are temporary. He does disbelieves in eternal fulfilment. He is willing to make the bargain, confident that even the devil cannot show him complete, permanent joy and happiness. The story of Faust thus, assigns false permanence as a central place in the idea of fulfilment. In essence, Faust bets that he can experience joy, pleasure, and satisfaction without wishing for them to last. But he loses. The implication is that the human being is unable to avoid wishing for pleasures to persist and endure. Also makes very negative comment about this wishful impermanence in fulfilment. He says that man is lost (to the devil) as soon as he wishes for permanence. It is acceptable to seek pleasure along with power and knowledge. But is not safe to wish for these things to provide permanent satisfactions. In particular, to seek fulfilment by seeking to prolong pleasure is futile and damning. The myth of Faust says that human experience is an ending change. To try to stop change, in order to prolong a fulfilling experience, is to lose one's humanity.