Can’t Get No Satisfaction

When you dream about life after the end of your primary career, what do you see? Maybe a life of comfort and ease? Financially comfortable. Someplace where the climate is more comfortable, less extreme. A smaller home, perhaps, but something really nice, comfortable. Yeah, that word comes up a lot.

Thanks to a movie by the same name, a lot of people have created a “bucket list” of adventures and experiences they hope to achieve in their third Third of life. The unspoken motivation for some is that life thus far has been incomplete, ordinary, and especially…boring. That’s why I need to run with the bulls in Pamplona, trek to Everest’s base camp, and free dive with the whale sharks at Koh Tao. After years of routine, a jolt of adrenaline would be a welcome diversion.

Let me go on record here–I enjoy being comfortable. I like warm socks, a full stomach and the comfort of my own bed. I’m not planning on retiring to a smoky cave on a mountain top somewhere. And I have a few adventures I’d like to take while I still have the resources and the health to do so. But I have been paying attention for a while now to the shelf life of comfort and stimulation. From what I’ve seen, neither satisfies for long.

I remember a conversation with a former client who had traveled extensively after his retirement. He and his wife had visited something like twenty countries in eighteen months. I was eager to hear stories about their favorite countries, memorable meals, breathtaking scenes, etc. Instead, he struggled to remember specifics. It had all kind of run together for him. In fact, trying to recall details seemed to discourage him. And that discouraged me.

In his 1841 essay, “Self-Reliance,” Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote “At home I dream that at Naples, at Rome, I can be intoxicated with beauty, and lose my sadness. I pack my trunk, embrace my friends, embark on the sea, and at last wake up in Naples, and there beside me is the stern fact, the sad self, unrelenting, identical, that I fled from.”

What I’m saying is this–Just because we can be perpetually comfortable, just because we can chase stimulation doesn’t mean we always should.

In his book, The Comfort Crisis, Michael Easter writes “A radical new body of evidence shows that people are at their best–physically harder, mentally tougher, and spiritually sounder–after experiencing the same discomforts our early ancestors were exposed to every day. Scientists are finding out that certain discomforts protect us from physical and psychological problems like obesity, heart disease, cancers, diabetes, depression, and anxiety, and even more fundamental issues like feeling a lack of meaning and purpose.”

According to this research, challenges like occasional hunger (fasting), exposure to cold, and pushing one’s physical limits are more likely to lead, not only to health, but to lasting sense of deeper satisfaction.

In a recent Atlantic article adapted from his new book*, Harvard professor Arthur Brooks wrote about the awkwardness of watching an old video clip of Mick Jagger with his teenage daughter. She didn’t understand the appeal–of the artist or the song. “Do people your age actually like this?” she asked.

“Satisfaction, I told my daughter, is the greatest paradox of human life. We crave it, we believe we can get it, we glimpse it and maybe even experience it for a brief moment, and then it vanishes. But we never give up on our quest to get and hold on to it. “I try, and I try, and I try, and I try,” Jagger sings. How? Through sex and consumerism, according to the song. By building a life that is ever more baroque, expensive, and laden with crap.”

Brooks summarizes this way, “Mick Jagger’s Satisfaction formula—and ours—starts with a rudimentary formula: Satisfaction = getting what you want.” This is what drives our quest for comfort and stimulation. That more is better. That more will make me happy. That satisfaction is out there waiting for me, if I can just figure out where to shop for it.

Brooks says a better formula is Satisfaction = what you have ÷ what you want. To summarize, satisfaction decreases when we try to increase our “haves”. But satisfaction grows when we decrease our “wants”. He advocates a Reverse Bucket List, eliminating those things that have no connection to our values.

In our Investigative Life Planning process, we guide clients to find clarity about their deepest values and priorities. The reasons are many, but in this context, when our pursuits are in line with those values, they then have the potential bring deep satisfaction.

For example, a doctor with a personal value of service to others may not find deep satisfaction on a luxury vacation to Cinque Terre, but find true significance and meaning in a refugee camp in Bangladesh. The first is a setting of great beauty and the most comfortable accommodations one can find. The second could not be more uncomfortable–rife with disease, crushing poverty, and need. Yet this doctor’s call to service is fulfilled in the latter, not the former, resulting in a sense of significance and meaning.

So let me encourage you to pay attention to your own long-term satisfaction with acquisition, and explore your own satisfaction with subtraction. I think it’s possible that becoming temporarily uncomfortable (i.e. eschewing adventure for service) could lead to a deeper satisfaction many of us have rarely experienced.

I’d love to hear from you as you process this. Life is too short to chase after those things that will ultimately disappoint. Let’s talk about finding your own path of significance and satisfaction.

* This essay is adapted from Arthur C. Brooks’s new book, From Strength to Strength: Finding Success, Happiness, and Deep Purpose in the Second Half of Life.

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