Have you known people who are perpetually disgruntled and cannot be made happy no matter what? I have. They hate their jobs. They hate their homes or apartments. They hate the store, the food, the weather, the music, the machines, the people. They are deeply wounded by something and the tendency to whinge about everything becomes a daily and hourly habit.
In a strange way, our culture has trained us for this. Everything about advertising and technology today feeds the sense that most everything is wrong in our lives and can be improved by getting some product. It is constant. It’s true in pharmacy, of course, but also in technology. Often the ads proclaim that whatever we are doing is wasting our time and that we need a fix as we make our way to the next thing that is also wasting our time.
The message: Get whatever we are doing over with so that we can move to the next thing, which we also want to be over so we can do the next thing. It’s a never-ending cycle.
The top emotion we feel is dissatisfaction. The case for this attitude is that it feeds progress. It inspires entrepreneurs to find new ways of meeting our needs, giving us cool gadgets, saving us time, and so on.
The idea is that the more we feel dissatisfied, the more we acquire, and the mark of industrial and cultural progress is for as many people as possible to be surrounded by time-saving doodads, foods, and drugs that we buy.
That’s fine, and I get it. Dissatisfaction can feed ambition if it is healthy, but it can instill perpetual sadness if it takes an unhealthy turn.
There is another side to the story of this issue of dissatisfaction, one that my mother would describe as “being satisfied with one’s lot.” It means to be genuinely grateful for what you have and to embrace the tasks, people, setting, and blessings that surround you as gifts to use well. To be happy no matter what your material circumstances are is spiritually healthy. It also takes great discipline.
“But it has now become an American virtue to be dissatisfied! It is acknowledged that dissatisfaction results in improvement or the invention of something new; that is good. But satisfaction has its benefits, too, and should least of all be ignored.”
If you accept dissatisfaction as a virtue, you trade in your good car, home, clothes, or even friends when they slightly annoy you, even though they are all just fine. In return, you gain possession of new things and people who also eventually dissatisfy you. The people who do this simply cannot be made happy. Every gift is inferior. Every friend is a failure. Every material good is a disappointment. Every job is a drag.
Some background on how economists themselves have fed this attitude: In the late 19th century, economist William Stanley Jevons penned a treatise on economics that followed up on Jeremy Bentham’s utilitarian views. Part of this involved positing human satisfaction as a theoretically measurable thing, measured in what he called “utils.”
Utils are units of things that we aspire to experience. The loss of utils is what we seek to avoid.
He applied this to labor for which we are paid. We seek the utils that come with money, but we give up utils in doing what is necessary to get them. Ideally, the utils that we get exceed those that we give up, which is why we keep working.
In this theory, which became widely accepted, labor is always considered a disutility. You will learn this in any introductory microeconomics text. It’s a way of saying that all work is ultimately a bummer, something we do only to get the money we need to buy other things.
There is a labor/leisure trade-off: We work more to purchase more leisure, even as our leisure is purchased with the money we lose from declining to work. All of this makes fascinating and tautological theory. It fits nicely into a model and a graph, and provides the illusion of understanding.
There is just one problem: It is likely not true or, more precisely, not true in every or most cases. The language itself is a problem. It feeds a sense that one should always find work to be regrettable, something to endure but never to enjoy. This has given birth to a phrase that drives me insane: the work/life balance. This is what everyone claims to seek.
But examine the assumptions behind this. It’s a strict dichotomy: One comes at the expense of the other. The use of the term “life” here is set against the term “work,” as if you cannot experience both at the same time. Life is lazy and pleasant, work is arduous and regrettable.
I swear to you that if you think this way, you will live a miserable life. You will anger your employers or your remunerative undertakings and feel nothing but dissatisfaction in life otherwise.
Put that way, the theory is preposterous. Work is what we wake up to do. We work to make coffee, work to shower, work to dress, work to clean, work to get to the office, work at the office, work in social hours to be charming and engaging, work to learn in the off hours, work to prepare dinner parties, work to clean up after guests, and so on. Life is work, and work is life. The absurd idea of “balancing” them is a poor excuse for being a layabout and doing shoddy work.
There is something else wrong with the theory: the notion that the only reason to work is to earn money, and that more money equals more motivation. Any employer will tell you that this is not true. A lazy employee will get worse with a raise, not better, because he has been rewarded for shoddiness.
The truly great workers are not motivated by money but have instead an inner drive to succeed. They are dreamers in love with what they do.
These people are not dissatisfied except maybe with their own work, and seek to do ever better. But they are satisfied with the opportunities that they have been given. They are not avaricious for material gain; they are thrilled that they are getting paid at all for doing something they love. In my experience, it is precisely those people who end up getting the raises and living a better life, not because they are richer but because they are content.
This idea that we need to make an effort at being satisfied is a fascinating one because I suspect that it is rare today. To be satisfied in one’s lot paves the way for happiness, security, confidence, and a pleasant demeanor that inspires others toward the same. People are attracted to those who seem to have it all together. And those who can maintain a sense of satisfaction even in high-stress situations, even when everything seems to be going wrong, invariably earn the respect of others.
Think of Elon Musk. You think that he is motivated by money? Not at all. He is worth $350 billion. He uses metrics of money as markers of a job well done, not as drivers of inspiration. He is a dreamer, and that was true when he was poor, too. The money is an effect and not a cause of his outlook.
Even if you don’t like him, he serves as a great example. Rich or poor, he is satisfied with his life in general and only feels dissatisfaction when he thinks that he could do a better job.
It doesn’t have to be Musk. Think of any farmer you know who wakes early to do the same tedious tasks over and over. He regards these tasks not as arduous but rather part of the liturgy of a good life, something to do in order to find fulfillment in what he is meant to do. Every good worker has the same outlook—not disgruntlement but joy in the doing.
This is what my mother meant when she told me to be satisfied with my lot. We had only one car in our family when I was growing up. When my friends shamed me for this, she would simply say we should be grateful for what we have and not jealous of others. This is how she trained me. She has always lived this way.
Jealousy is a bitter emotion that leads to an unhappy life because it can never be fully satisfied. To be satisfied in whatever material position we find ourselves in is a path of virtue. It also happens to be a mental framework common to the people who are most successful and most happy. But adopting that attitude runs contrary to the culture today, which is imbued with the messaging that you should be forever disgruntled, disappointed, and dissatisfied.
