You Will Never Be Satisfied

Imagine you’re one of our hunter gatherer ancestors. You’ve just fulfilled your deepest desire: you’ve climbed to the top of the social hierarchy. Will you be satisfied?

Nope. People envy those at the top. They seek every opportunity to tear them down. No matter how nice you are to everyone, someone will be jealous. People may be conspiring against you at this very moment. You should not be satisfied until everyone loves you.

Okay, let’s say everyone loves you. Will you be satisfied?

Nope. Their love is conditional—and precarious. One wrong move and you could fall from their graces, losing everything you worked so hard to achieve. You won’t be satisfied until everyone loves you unconditionally.

Okay, let’s say everyone loves you unconditionally. Will you be satisfied?

Nope. How do you know they love you unconditionally? Are you 100% certain? They could be faking it. They could be secretly plotting your demise behind their wooden smiles. The only way to be satisfied is if they prove their undying devotion to you with costly rituals, flattery competitions, and conspicuous self-flagellation.

Okay, let’s say they do all that stuff. Surely now you will be satisfied, right?

Nope. What about that other tribe over there? They love their leader unconditionally too, and they think their leader is better than you. Maybe their group is plotting the demise of your group. The only way you can be satisfied is if you conquer them and force them to pledge their fealty to you.

Okay let’s say you conquer them and force them to pledge their fealty to you. Now will you be satisfied?

Nope. What about all the other groups out there? There’s more than two groups in the world. What if all those other guys are plotting your demise? To be truly satisfied, you must rule the world.

Okay let’s say you rule the world (and you’ve now gotten as far as about .000000000000001% of all humans that have ever existed). Wow. If there’s anything that can satisfy a human primate, this has got to be it. Are you satisfied?

Nope. Now you’ve got a bunch of different subordinate groups that need to prove their loyalty to you. And much more fertile soil for rebellion to flower. Kicking back and relaxing is no longer an option for you. Maintaining your power is a full-time job—and a very stressful one at that. Plus you’re getting old and people are starting to wonder who will succeed you. You’ve got to make sure your progeny will reap the fruits of your conquest. And you’ve got to protect your historical legacy, which could be destroyed at any moment by heretics and dissidents. People are starting to question whether you’re getting too old—whether you still have what it takes. Will you slip up? Will you be killed in your sleep? Can you afford to close your eyes at night?

So yea, you’re definitely not satisfied. After ascending further up the ladder of desire than basically any human that has ever existed, you are now a nervous wreck, with no end to the desiring in sight.

The hamster wheel of being alive

I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but most of our desires are like this. From mating to parenting to skill mastery, there is no end to the desiring in sight—or at least, no end that makes sense from a Darwinian perspective. You can always go further, you can always get more—more more more—and the further you go, and the better you get, the more you have to worry about sliding back to where you started, or getting bested by your more formidable tier of competitors.

More status means more pressure, higher standards, and higher expectations from your adoring fans. More kids means more messes to clean up and lunches to pack and conflicts to resolve. More power means more stress to endure and decisions to make and harsher penalties for making the wrong ones.

It gets worse. Desires are like weeds that grow back thicker and heartier once killed. After all, getting what you want doesn’t mean you should stop wanting that thing. More often, it means the opposite: you should want it more.

Think of a business. If profits are booming and customers are waiting in line for hours for your product, is that the time to downsize and scale back production? No, that’s the time to expand, hire, and scale up. The boom in profits is a sign that things are going well and you need to invest more in the business—not less.

Research by Cameron Anderson and colleagues shows that high-status people are more obsessed with status than low-status people, and the causal arrow goes from status to status obsession. Which makes sense, given that high-status people are in the social equivalent of a booming business with customers waiting in line for hours, and evolution has given them a powerful urge to ramp up their investments.

The lesson is clear enough in the case of drug addiction. Generously helping yourself to cocaine will not reduce your desire for cocaine; it will increase it. Smoking a ton of cigarettes will not satisfy your craving for nicotine; it will intensify it. What is true about addiction may apply to human motivation more broadly, albeit applied to less pathological targets.

If you eat lots of yummy food, your desire for yummy food will not wane. No, you will turn into a foodie and seek the finest wines and the tenderest Wagyu beef. If you watch lots of great movies, your desire for great movies will not diminish. No, you will become a film snob and watch 7-hour black-and-white films about the collapse of a farming collective in post-communist Hungary.

Nassim Taleb talks about how some things are “antifragile,” where the more you damage them, the stronger they get. Well, many of our desires are “antisatisfiable.” The more you satisfy them, the harder it becomes to satisfy them.

So the nightmare of the human condition is even more horrifying than the Buddhists imagined. It’s not merely that our striving is futile—that satisfaction is fleeting. It’s that satisfaction often makes matters worse. It gives birth to new desires that are even more powerful and persnickety than the ones that came before.

The takeaway

I’d love to leave you with some lesson like “embrace Buddhist teachings and shun all craving and desire” or whatever, but I don’t think that’s possible. I agree with Will Storr that Buddhism is, in practice, just another kind of status game. I’m not sure there’s any way out of it all except death.

So why am I bumming you out with this stuff? Aside from the fact that I think it’s true and interesting, it’s helpful. It protects you from being manipulated. The next time some propagandist is trying to sell you a vision of utopia, you might remember this post and realize that utopia is bullshit. The next time some self-help guru is trying to sell you a vision of nirvana—some trick to finally being satisfied—you might remember this post and realize the guru is full of shit.

The illusion that the arc of desire bends toward satisfaction, just out of reach, just beyond the horizon, is not only a trick of the light; it’s the chief weapon in the bullshitter’s arsenal. It’s their ultimate bargaining chip—the biggest carrot they can dangle in front of you. The bullshitter can trick you into thinking they have the satisfaction you’re seeking, the end to all your striving and thrashing and flailing, if only you’ll purchase their introductory package or join their cult.

The knowledge that nobody actually wants to be happy and all we really want is to run on a hamster wheel until we die of exhaustion—that knowledge is a kind of bullshit-protective armor. It’s a heavy weight to carry, yes, but it keeps you safe.

Besides, I find it kind of comforting. When I hold it in my mind, I feel a wave of relaxation wash over me, a kind of letting go, plus a chuckle at how absurd it all is. I realize that I no longer have to worry that I’m missing out on some secret to eternal bliss, some shimmering fountain of joy that everyone is frolicking in but me. I no longer have to feel envy—or at least, not as much of it. It might seem like other people have totally made it and they’re just swimming in awesome vibes all the time. But no, in all likelihood they’re running just as fast as I am on the treadmill to nowhere.

Yea, life is beautiful and every moment is precious or whatever, but there’s another side of the story you almost never hear: most of life is pretty stressful, mediocre, and unsatisfying, and then you die.

It’s kind of funny when you think about it, in a dark sort of way. And also… miraculous. We are, perhaps, the only animal in the history of life on earth to realize that we will never be satisfied.