So I was reflecting just now on happiness and satisfaction and I think a truly unique thought just hit me:
Life is set up so people are fundamentally unsatisfiable.
That sounds more pessimistic than it is. And I’m not trying to say that life sucks, or everything’s pointless or anything angsty like that, just that if you think about it, we’re all really unsatisfiable.
Consider the happy-go-lucky person who really is capable of being satisfied. If he had a certain level of wealth, security and basic position in life, he probably would be satisfied. The problem is that in order to attain those things, he needs to compete with other people to get them and to keep them.
The problem is that some of the people he has to compete with are unsatisfiable, hyper-competitive types. No matter how much they have, they won’t be satisfied if someone else has more. In any contest for resource or position, the unsatisfiable people are likely to win because they have just a little bit more edge in them.
So there you have the paradox. The people who could potentially be satisfied don’t have the stuff. The people who have the stuff can’t be satisfied. Maybe it’s possible, with this revelation in hand, to create a split in your mind. To have the competitive person only come out when necessary and have them go away when not. I suppose that remains to be seen.
Now obviously these are sweeping generalizations. There’s always the humble little grandma who wins the lottery, or the oil tycoon who sees the light and retires to run an orphanage. But those are the exception.
I’m also not talking about happiness, necessarily. It’s possible for both those people to be happy, especially if they tend to be optimistic kinds of people. It’s just that they’ll never be satisfied.
This whole question is especially interesting to me because I feel like at one point in my life I was the easily satisfied person without an edge, and now I’m the unsatisfiable person with an edge. As soon as I got that edge to me I became much more successful, but no more satisfied. At every point, though, I’ve been equally happy.
