I think we are breeding a certain kind of dissatisfied person. It seems like everything that is provided in this world has only made us more and more unsatisfied. It’s as if the whole world has grown in so many dimensions, and we could be satisfied ten times over, but it’s still not enough. The strange thing is, this attitude is now seeping into how we perceive people as well, because it seems like people are also not enough. They’re either not smart enough, not good-looking enough, they don’t give us enough attention, or they’re not spiritual enough. It’s as if everything is just fundamentally unsatisfactory to us, yet we keep chasing this satisfaction.

Every new thing excites the mind, but a mind that seeks truth turns from the new and seeks the old.

— Seneca, Letters to Lucilius

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I do wonder why we got to such a place and whether it’s a factor of our conditioning or just a factor of humans being humans. I think there is a social element to this because our culture has brainwashed us into believing that more is better, that new is better, and that we must use and discard: change jobs, change companies, change partners. We have been told that things are temporary, so we should never really commit to anything (except capitalism, that is). The strange paradox of this is that the more we chase this kind of lifestyle, the more we are permanently dissatisfied.

The Hunger Within

In all my times fasting, I’ve noticed something fundamental. In the beginning, it is the desire for food that seems hardest to let go of. But what I discovered is that it wasn’t really the desire for food itself, but the satisfaction that comes when hunger disappears. This feeling of filling the void of our hunger with food is one of the most basic and fundamental ways desire lives in our body. I find it telling that in modern society, this basic mechanism has morphed and found its way into different, exaggerated activities—we’re trying to fill existential hunger with material consumption, spiritual hunger with endless experiences.

As Aldous Huxley observed in Brave New World Revisited: “The dictatorships of tomorrow will deprive men of their freedom, but will give them in exchange a happiness none the less real, as a subjective experience, for being chemically induced. The pursuit of happiness is one of the traditional rights of man; unfortunately, the achievement of happiness may turn out to be incompatible with another of man’s rights—liberty.”

This pursuit of happiness has been turned into the pursuit of pleasure, and pleasure has been turned into an addiction that requires ever-increasing doses to achieve ever-diminishing returns. We can see this in people who have chased too much pleasure or have had early success; they don’t seem to be satisfied with anything less than what they’ve had. Any following success or any new pleasure after a certain point does not feel as sweet as that first taste did. Like tolerance to a drug, our threshold for satisfaction continuously rises, leaving us perpetually chasing a high that recedes even as we approach it. The generation of my age that is currently in this place now believes that one day this satisfaction will come back again, but truth be told, it is a numbing effect which slowly starts to change how we perceive events.

The Addiction to More

It is like how the first hit of a drug is always the best, and addicts often spend their whole addiction careers chasing that first high. We are now in this phase where this lure of satisfaction, pleasure, success, and achievements is all coming to us, more and more. I start wondering if this even makes sense at all because our society is trying to make us believe that these pursuits are worthy. But what if they’re not? What if they are just empty pursuits that have been designed to keep the economy going, or to keep the rich getting richer, or as a way to control populations politically? I think the reasons are far too many to fathom, and we should try to see what the effects are, what they’re leading to, and try to reduce those.

For example, the fact that we have been trying not to be satisfied is leading us to discard things that are very good for our being. We might not be satisfied with how evolved our parents are or how advanced our society is because we are comparing it with other societies around the world that we can see through the internet. But what we see through the internet is just a window and not the whole picture, and we miss the context in which these things are happening. Also, what we see through the internet is just visual. We do not feel what it’s like to be in a different society. We do not hear the sounds; we do not smell the smells. We just see pictures that can be misleading because they only represent a cropped-out perspective.

The Paradox of Individualism

So, desiring something to be like something else we’ve seen is the first mistake we’re making as a collective. And the funniest thing is that we are making this mistake as individuals, but if everyone is pursuing individualism, then doesn’t individualism become a collective activity? Doesn’t individualism become a social movement? It seems that within this idea of individualism, the lie is built into itself. We are lying to ourselves if we believe that we are truly individuals because society is made up of people, and the unique actions and perspectives of people make up a society. It goes both ways. We cannot simply see ourselves as separate from the world or from our environment.

The sociologist David Riesman observed this phenomenon decades ago in The Lonely Crowd—that modern individuals, while believing themselves unique, actually take their cues from their peer group. We perform our individuality for an audience, making even our rebellion conformist. The very act of trying to be different becomes a shared cultural practice, a collective pursuit of individual distinction.

Ancient Wisdom and Modern Lies

If we look historically, how much has this idea of satisfaction really played a part in the lives of our ancestors? Have they tried to chase satisfaction? Have they tried to chase this feeling of fulfilment or of arriving at a point where you do not need to do anything anymore? The Buddhist concept of dukkha—often translated as suffering but more accurately meaning ‘unsatisfactoriness’—suggests this isn’t merely modern. What’s changed is our response: where ancient philosophies taught acceptance of impermanence, we’ve built an entire economy on the promise of permanent satisfaction.

Because if we really look at it, the ideas that float around in the capitalistic economy and society are of reaching a final end. It could be in work life, where the end is a blissful retirement where one does not have to think about money at all, and they can just watch the butterflies and sit in the forest and do nothing. The economy also seems to want to reach a space of paradise where all is bountiful and good, everyone has everything they need, and the Earth is pretty and serene.

These ideas are often just lies that keep us working towards a goal that will never arrive and, for the good of the economy, should never arrive. So here it seems very clear that we see satisfaction as an end state, and in this end state, we have a kind of depressing conclusion. Why depressing? Because if we look at the things that give us joy, it is often the journey. It is often the struggle that makes these things worth doing.

The Dance, Not the Destination

An adventure is never about arriving at the place; it’s about the journey you took to get there. Music is never about the end but about the movement of sounds that lead towards the final end, and often the end is sad because while the music is going on, that’s when it’s the best. Alan Watts compared this to dancing—you don’t dance to arrive at a particular spot on the floor. So, it seems like our chase for satisfaction is like we want the music to end. But what this really shows us is that we’re not enjoying the music. So, in all this, the desire for some kind of completion is often a mistake.

This is not to say that all of society’s values are a lie, but rather the ones that promise us things that we might not want, or goals that might never arrive, are the lies that we need to wake up from. And why even say “wake up”? To my mind, it seems like we need to open our eyes to see the way the world is going, to see what we are doing and why we are doing it. Without the ability to introspect and reflect, we have no reason to be sure of anything. Without the ability to reflect, we can take anyone’s word for anything as long as it fits in our neat little filters.

We must not wish for the disappearance of our troubles but for the grace to transform them.

— Simone Weil

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The Secret of Letting Go

We have to continuously find out why it is we are desiring satisfaction. Why it is we are desiring at all. And then, and only then, can we find it within ourselves to let go of this hunger. Because there is the secret of fasting: it is about letting go of the hunger. And eventually, when we do eat, it is the sweetest thing in the world.

Paradoxically, satisfaction comes when we let go of the desire for satisfaction.