Is Never Being Satisfied a Good Thing or Bad Thing?

“Always be content; never be satisfied,” is a statement that I like to use to explain the ideal attitude that you should have toward life. It’s a succinct way to explain the (seemingly paradoxical) relationship between two things that you need to do simultaneously: you want to always be grateful for what you have (which should make you feel appreciation and contentment), but you should always strive to be better and more (i.e., never get complacent and stop growing). The former is represented by the famous quotation, “Be grateful for everything you have in life,” while the latter is lampooned by the comedian Bill Hicks when he tells the joke, “Adam and Eve were in the Garden of Eden, and Adam said one day, Wow, Eve, here we are, at one with nature, at one with God, we'll never age, we'll never die, and all our dreams come true the instant that we have them. And Eve said, Yeah... it's just not enough is it?” So, what’s up with this paradox? Is it good or bad to be satisfied?

In short, the ideal balance is to be happy with where you are and excited about where you are going. If you do that, you will be in the perfect place of living in the moment while working toward the future. An example might be how you work hard for most of the year and then take a two-week vacation where you just disconnect and relax. If you’re on vacation and you worry incessantly about the future, then you’re not getting the stress relief that the vacation is meant to provide. On the other hand, if you constantly sit around and play video games and never work toward your goals, you’ll never improve your life. People who get used to things often take them for granted and fail to maintain them, while people who can never live in the moment because they are thinking about the past or future will burn themselves out with stress.

So, how do you strike this balance? There are a few techniques to help you balance your life between contentment and drive:

• Be Present in Work and Play – If you have dedicated time to completing a task or resting, commit to that time. There are likely problems in your life and in the world, but if you worry about them at all times then you will never have productive work or play time. When you are in the middle of something, be there mentally as well as physically. Unless you can do something about the thing you could be worried about, set aside the worry.
• Dedicate Time to Appreciation – This is a popular technique for people from a variety of different belief systems, from Judeo-Christian religions to New Age practitioners to mindfulness and positive psychology experts. The idea is simply to spend time being thankful for the good things in your life. Whether you pray to a God and thank Him or simply list things you like and feel the appreciation come over you doesn’t seem to make a huge difference in the psychology studies on psychological wellbeing; the point is to focus on the good things in your life to feel more appreciation.
• Set New Goals – When people are listless or complacent, it is a good time to set new goals to light a fire underneath you and get you going toward something new or more. An example is if you take time after achieving a big goal (e.g., graduation from high school or college, winning the Super Bowl, publishing a book) and then begin to fall into indecision or emptiness as the thing you had been working so hard toward is done and now there’s nothing to fill it yet. Setting goals will allow you to push forward and begin making progress again if you are too much on the side of keeping the status quo.
• Try Something New – When people get stuck in a routine, a rut, or a period of uncertainty, they can often just need to have that situation disrupted. For example, the reason people are uncertain is usually that they don’t feel like they have enough information. So, the way to get out of it is to gather new information through research or a new experience. Similarly, a routine or a rut might cause you to feel like you can’t think of anything else you might want to go after, and that’s usually only because you either haven’t seen something you want or you don’t believe that you can get the things you want. In either case, trying something new can expose you to new desires (e.g., window shopping is a great example of this approach) or to give you new experiences that might change your beliefs (e.g., if you think you’ll hate a certain food but then you try it and it becomes your favorite). Just like a new problem can capture your whole attention and emotional state, so can a new positive experience capture your imagination on what’s possible in your life.
• Set Milestones – When you work on a long-term goal, not taking time to appreciate your progress can wear you down. As such, it can disrupt your balance of contentment/satisfaction and so you might give up if you keep working and working to no avail. To avoid this, you can set milestones that can benefit three-fold: you can reward yourself for attaining it; you can take a moment to rest and recover at a logical point; you can acknowledge your progress thus far. All three benefits will sustain your motivation and reduce the risk of giving up.
• Push Yourself Toward and Past Your Limits – One of the downsides of satisfaction is that you might stop before you reach your full potential. It’s a strange irony that many people think makes life miserable: you can be happy, or you can be great. There’s one hint of truth to it: you have to ignore the “good enough” if you want to be great, but that voice in your head telling you it’s good enough is likely the same one who wants to be complacent. So, you have to decide where in your life you want to listen to the “satisficing” voice vs. the “maximizing” voice (in psychology, satisficers are people who stop when they get to good enough; maximizers keep pushing until they’ve attained the best or optimal outcome).
  

I’m sure that you can think of many more. The point of these techniques is to give you the best balance between contentment with your life and desire for more. Never being satisfied can be a good thing or a bad thing, depending on how it optimizes your outcomes in life. If you’re never satisfied with other people, for example, then you’ll likely have unhealthy relationships—you need to be appreciative of others even as you push them to be better just like you should for yourself. Similarly, you can keep pushing yourself, but if it makes you miserable and less productive, then it might be backfiring. Try to find the optimal balance between contentment with your life and desire for more that works for you to maximize your happiness and fulfillment with life. The balance that keeps you growing in a healthy way and you feel good about is likely the correct one.