“We believe that we can change the things around us in accordance with our desires—we believe it because otherwise we can see no favorable outcome. We do not think of the outcome which generally comes to pass and is also favorable: we do not succeed in changing things in accordance with our desires, but gradually our desires change. The situation that we hoped to change because it was intolerable becomes unimportant to us. We have failed to surmount the obstacle, as we were absolutely determined to do, but life has taken us round it, led us beyond it, and then if we turn round to gaze into the distance of the past, we can barely see it, so imperceptible has it become.” – Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time
To be honest i couldn't think of any particular book to get a passage from so i looked one up. This passage from the book, In search of lost time caught my eye because it talks about what people do all the time. The way I interpret this passage is when something gets hard, people tent to give up or make excuses. One particular line that stood out to me is,"We do not succeed in changing things in accordance with our desires, but gradually our desires change." Let's say you're trying to follow your dreams and things gets hard and not going the way you want them to go, we change our desires or "dreams" so we don't have to face some sort of failure.
I can see the interpretation you went with. I also think things that seem so urgent or important to us often change over time and we often end up not even wanting that "thing" anymore. Sometimes things turn out better than what we thought we really wanted. Like the old Garth Brooks song: "Sometimes I thank God for unanswered prayers."
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