finding satisfaction
Although humans have material needs, such as food, clothing, and shelter, we've long known that humans also have immaterial needs, such as friendship, romance, entertainment, community standing, and spirituality. This is definitely an incomplete list!
Material needs can be met with far less GDP than the wealthier countries produce in this 21st Century. Over the great span of human history, a comparable GDP of $1,000 per capita was enough for societies to survive and reproduce themselves. Not all of their children survived, and they didn't have Netflix to binge, but a reading of ancient literature and ancient history finds that people were no less content two thousand years ago than they are now. And today, it is generally people in the wealther countries who are the most discontent, with US residents among the most discontent on the planet.
Over 20 years ago I began to study contentment, because I knew I lacked it. This journey soon led me toward a philosophy of "wanting what I have", which paradoxically led me into huge life changes. I dropped out of the capitalist rat race, finding a job with a nonprofit instead, then I went to law school, then I pursued a career in public service as an attorney. At the same time, I broke up with my monogamous partner and pursued a lifestyle of polyamory.
I found this journey paradoxical -- that by studying a philosophy of "wanting what I have", I ended up changing my life in gigantic ways. Instead of focusing on atheism I changed to focus on Buddhism. Instead of working long hours for profit-exploiting bosses, I committed myself to a healthy life of appropriate diet and exercise. Why did all these changes result from "wanting what I have"? I think it is because when I stopped wanting more, I realized what it was about life that I actually wanted. This doesn't sound like a rational progression of thought to me, but ... that's how it went.
I still encountered some wrenching difficulties in my life, especially after my father died and I ended up in a mental hospital for a long weekend. I still struggled to find relationships and then to make my relationships work. I still sought therapy and sometimes medication. I still competed for promotions. I went along with buying a house in the suburbs, and then proposed also keeping a condo downtown. I trained for marathons. I was involved with political activism for a time, before I became a federal employee and focused more on my government work than on political activism from the outside (which is limited by the Hatch Act anyway).
I haven't always been satisfied with what I had, even though that was my intended path. Probably the darkest period was when T and I had relationship difficulties at the same time that the mortgage was underwater and after T & K had broken up. Perhaps I should've broken up with T and moved out also, but I stuck around and tried to make the relationship work, because I genuinely cared about him and did not want to break up with T simply because he had broken up with K. I "wanted what I had", but it was terribly difficult to hold onto what I had for a while, and it didn't feel much rewarding.
-----
When I encounter people today who are not satisfied, I wish I could give them the benefit of my own journey, but that journey took decades and was not always wonderful and included a pit stop at a mental hospital. But I still believe in that first principle, that I discovered somewhat arbitrarily: "Want what you have."
Nowadays, even a cursory examination of the philosophy of contentment (via Wikipedia) would lead people to this same starting point.
From Wikipedia:
The literature above all states that contentment is a state which is ideally reached through being happy with what a person has, as opposed to achieving one's larger ambitions. Socrates described this by saying, "He who is not contented with what he has, would not be contented with what he would like to have."
Maybe the way Socrates said it explains what I feel is the paradox of my own "progress" toward contentment. By trying to be content with what I had, I learned to both achieve what I wanted and to be content with it afterward.
At this point in my life, the challenge I'm facing is almost entirely a result of being close enough to retirement that it seems like a worthwhile thing to wait for, instead of striking out on my own right now without a lifetime pension and health care. If I assume I'm living until I'm about 80 years old, I can work my current job for 5 more years and then have 20 years of retirement, or I can ... do ... WTF ... and then not be able to retire in five years ...
So it can seem like I'm stuck here. My challenge is to make the best of both my work time and my free time until I turn 60. How to optimize my free time? But part of what calls to me now is wanting to continue to be of service to the public, only in different ways from those my career has led me to. Pulling in revenue for the federal government feels more pointless nowadays than ever, now the federal government mainly pays for everything on the credit card, with practically zero concern for how much revenue it is pulling in.
Plus, I feel more pressing problems now than I did 21 years ago -- problems of overpopulation and climate change, problems of rising inequality and declining democracy. I feel my job has nothing to say to these problems. Nobody cares how much revenue I'm raising, and I'm not able to focus on what I think are the worst problems facing our global community. Nor the worst problems facing my local community.
If I knew I wouldn't get a pension, I'd probably be redesigning my life already. Perhaps the irony of my life will become more clear later, when the federal government collapses along with my "lifetime" pension. Or when I die suddenly on the day before my 60th birthday.
-----
But these are all choices I'm making, risks I'm taking, in full knowledge, with full consent.
I'm still concerned about the many many people around me who are so dissatisfied with their lives. But becoming satisfied is really more of an internal project for each person, than something I can provide from the outside. For people who lack basic material needs, I can give to charity to help, although this won't necessarily lead them to satisfaction. But for the people close to me, material needs are usually not the problem. The most dissatisfied person in my circle makes more $$$,$$$ than I do, has a more beautiful dwelling than I do, and has multiple romantic relationships as I do. Yet, he's terribly terribly dissatisfied, and when I look at his life I can't help but think it is because he doesn't want what he has. He hasn't figured out how to pursue the path of wanting what you have.
And I think as a country, we definitely haven't figured out this trick. Instead, it seems by living inside personalized media bubbles, people have intensified their desires for what they don't have, even for what they cannot have. When I was 30 years old, I didn't have this kind of competition for my spiritual happiness that everybody has on their phones today. But I am still challenged by it today, but luckily I discovered the path of "wanting what I have" before the iPhone came along in 2007.
I think discovering that path is much more difficult now.
Sometimes technological progress makes our lives more difficult. There's a school of thought that agriculture made things worse for the human race, and then so did the industrial revolution, and now some of us are thinking the technological revolution is making things worse also. Yes, we neo-hunter/gatherers, heh. But perhaps the challenge is always the same, regardless of the technological conditions of your life -- you still have to want what you have.
Material needs can be met with far less GDP than the wealthier countries produce in this 21st Century. Over the great span of human history, a comparable GDP of $1,000 per capita was enough for societies to survive and reproduce themselves. Not all of their children survived, and they didn't have Netflix to binge, but a reading of ancient literature and ancient history finds that people were no less content two thousand years ago than they are now. And today, it is generally people in the wealther countries who are the most discontent, with US residents among the most discontent on the planet.
Over 20 years ago I began to study contentment, because I knew I lacked it. This journey soon led me toward a philosophy of "wanting what I have", which paradoxically led me into huge life changes. I dropped out of the capitalist rat race, finding a job with a nonprofit instead, then I went to law school, then I pursued a career in public service as an attorney. At the same time, I broke up with my monogamous partner and pursued a lifestyle of polyamory.
I found this journey paradoxical -- that by studying a philosophy of "wanting what I have", I ended up changing my life in gigantic ways. Instead of focusing on atheism I changed to focus on Buddhism. Instead of working long hours for profit-exploiting bosses, I committed myself to a healthy life of appropriate diet and exercise. Why did all these changes result from "wanting what I have"? I think it is because when I stopped wanting more, I realized what it was about life that I actually wanted. This doesn't sound like a rational progression of thought to me, but ... that's how it went.
I still encountered some wrenching difficulties in my life, especially after my father died and I ended up in a mental hospital for a long weekend. I still struggled to find relationships and then to make my relationships work. I still sought therapy and sometimes medication. I still competed for promotions. I went along with buying a house in the suburbs, and then proposed also keeping a condo downtown. I trained for marathons. I was involved with political activism for a time, before I became a federal employee and focused more on my government work than on political activism from the outside (which is limited by the Hatch Act anyway).
I haven't always been satisfied with what I had, even though that was my intended path. Probably the darkest period was when T and I had relationship difficulties at the same time that the mortgage was underwater and after T & K had broken up. Perhaps I should've broken up with T and moved out also, but I stuck around and tried to make the relationship work, because I genuinely cared about him and did not want to break up with T simply because he had broken up with K. I "wanted what I had", but it was terribly difficult to hold onto what I had for a while, and it didn't feel much rewarding.
-----
When I encounter people today who are not satisfied, I wish I could give them the benefit of my own journey, but that journey took decades and was not always wonderful and included a pit stop at a mental hospital. But I still believe in that first principle, that I discovered somewhat arbitrarily: "Want what you have."
Nowadays, even a cursory examination of the philosophy of contentment (via Wikipedia) would lead people to this same starting point.
From Wikipedia:
The literature above all states that contentment is a state which is ideally reached through being happy with what a person has, as opposed to achieving one's larger ambitions. Socrates described this by saying, "He who is not contented with what he has, would not be contented with what he would like to have."
Maybe the way Socrates said it explains what I feel is the paradox of my own "progress" toward contentment. By trying to be content with what I had, I learned to both achieve what I wanted and to be content with it afterward.
At this point in my life, the challenge I'm facing is almost entirely a result of being close enough to retirement that it seems like a worthwhile thing to wait for, instead of striking out on my own right now without a lifetime pension and health care. If I assume I'm living until I'm about 80 years old, I can work my current job for 5 more years and then have 20 years of retirement, or I can ... do ... WTF ... and then not be able to retire in five years ...
So it can seem like I'm stuck here. My challenge is to make the best of both my work time and my free time until I turn 60. How to optimize my free time? But part of what calls to me now is wanting to continue to be of service to the public, only in different ways from those my career has led me to. Pulling in revenue for the federal government feels more pointless nowadays than ever, now the federal government mainly pays for everything on the credit card, with practically zero concern for how much revenue it is pulling in.
Plus, I feel more pressing problems now than I did 21 years ago -- problems of overpopulation and climate change, problems of rising inequality and declining democracy. I feel my job has nothing to say to these problems. Nobody cares how much revenue I'm raising, and I'm not able to focus on what I think are the worst problems facing our global community. Nor the worst problems facing my local community.
If I knew I wouldn't get a pension, I'd probably be redesigning my life already. Perhaps the irony of my life will become more clear later, when the federal government collapses along with my "lifetime" pension. Or when I die suddenly on the day before my 60th birthday.
-----
But these are all choices I'm making, risks I'm taking, in full knowledge, with full consent.
I'm still concerned about the many many people around me who are so dissatisfied with their lives. But becoming satisfied is really more of an internal project for each person, than something I can provide from the outside. For people who lack basic material needs, I can give to charity to help, although this won't necessarily lead them to satisfaction. But for the people close to me, material needs are usually not the problem. The most dissatisfied person in my circle makes more $$$,$$$ than I do, has a more beautiful dwelling than I do, and has multiple romantic relationships as I do. Yet, he's terribly terribly dissatisfied, and when I look at his life I can't help but think it is because he doesn't want what he has. He hasn't figured out how to pursue the path of wanting what you have.
And I think as a country, we definitely haven't figured out this trick. Instead, it seems by living inside personalized media bubbles, people have intensified their desires for what they don't have, even for what they cannot have. When I was 30 years old, I didn't have this kind of competition for my spiritual happiness that everybody has on their phones today. But I am still challenged by it today, but luckily I discovered the path of "wanting what I have" before the iPhone came along in 2007.
I think discovering that path is much more difficult now.
Sometimes technological progress makes our lives more difficult. There's a school of thought that agriculture made things worse for the human race, and then so did the industrial revolution, and now some of us are thinking the technological revolution is making things worse also. Yes, we neo-hunter/gatherers, heh. But perhaps the challenge is always the same, regardless of the technological conditions of your life -- you still have to want what you have.