On Restlessness: Why Is It So Difficult To Feel That Life Is Enough?
Have you ever noticed that as soon as you attain one goal you're thinking about the next? I do, and I find myself increasingly wondering why this is. Why is it such a feature of my experience, and presumably therefore part of the human condition, even at the cost of consciously celebrating achievements?
Yes, there always seems to be something else: another book to write, another qualification to acquire, another place to visit, another project to begin, another improvement to make to the house, another financial threshold to reach, another contribution to make. Even when life is, by most reasonable measures, good, the mind seems remarkably adept at turning its attention towards whatever remains absent, incomplete or still to come.
Some of this is surely a good thing; after all, restlessness can be energising, motivating and creative. Dissatisfaction with the way things are has generated scholarship, art, political reform, scientific discovery and innumerable improvements in individual lives across the millennia. The desire to become better at something, to understand more, to create, contribute or change circumstances that have become constraining is hardly something we should wish away.
Yet I wonder increasingly about the point at which a capacity for aspiration becomes self-defeating, an inability to let ourselves enjoy what we have, satisfied with our efforts. What would it actually mean to believe, even temporarily, that one's life was enough? What would be the impact if we did?
These are age-old questions.
An Ancient Problem
I've been reading Robert Wright's Why Buddhism Is True (2017) and what's become apparent to me is how thoroughly contemporary some very ancient Buddhist observations about human experience are. At the heart of Buddhist thought is the concept of dukkha. It is often translated as 'suffering', although this can make it sound rather more dramatic than much of what it describes. Dukkha also encompasses something closer to dissatisfaction or unsatisfactoriness, that is, the persistent inability of the things to which we attach ourselves to provide lasting satisfaction. We want something; we obtain it; and for a while it pleases us. Then the pleasure fades, the thing becomes ordinary, or something else attracts our attention. The cycle begins over again.
Closely associated with this is tanhā, usually translated as craving or thirst: our tendency continually to reach towards experiences, possessions and states of being that we imagine will somehow resolve the dissatisfaction (Wright, 2017). Yet the satisfaction they provide is transient. The new job becomes 'the job'; the new house becomes 'the house'; the achievement that once appeared so important becomes purely an entry on our CV. The book we slaved over for years takes its place on the shelf and our attention turns to the next.
There is an important historical point here: we did not need consumer capitalism, social media, the contemporary workplace or the personal development industry to make us feel a sense of perpetual restlessness. Human beings have been struggling with the cyclic nature of desire and instability of satisfaction forever. It recalls the elementary economic problem I first encountered at school, aged 14: human wants are treated as effectively unlimited while resources remain scarce.
Christianity, of course, also has its own language to describe this basic human experience, though it spiritualises it somewhat and says we need to reorient the discontent we feel towards the divine. Augustine's famous description of the human heart as restless until it rests in God (Confessions, Book I) begins from a rather different theology and arrives at a rather different destination. His observation is intriguing. Something about ordinary human wanting seems unable finally to satisfy itself.
Two very different religious traditions, then, recognise something fundamental about the difficulty human beings have in resting contentedly within the lives they already possess, and each calls for a radical reorientation of our attitude to the material. It is worth being honest, though, that this is a family resemblance rather than a shared conclusion; dukkha points towards seeing through craving itself, towards a disidentification from wanting as the remedy, whereas Augustine's restlessness has a specific address, and can only be answered by rest in God. That two such different accounts of what the discontent means, and of what might resolve it, nonetheless agree so precisely about its persistence, seems to me the more striking fact, not the less.
Why Might We Be Like This?
Wright's particular contribution is to place Buddhist insights into conversation with evolutionary psychology, and it is worth acknowledging, before going further, that adaptationist stories of this kind are notoriously difficult to test and can be a little too easy to construct after the fact; even so, the broad picture on offer here still seems to me suggestive rather than merely convenient. From an evolutionary perspective, there is little obvious reason why natural selection should have equipped us for enduring contentment; seeking pleasure has functions. Eating, sexual activity, social recognition and the acquisition of resources all encouraged behaviours that, in particular environments, contributed to survival and reproduction. For these mechanisms to continue working, however, their rewards could hardly be permanently satisfying. Hunger returns; sexual desire returns; the pleasure associated with an acquisition fades; social position has to be maintained; threats continue to command attention. What seemed extraordinary can, remarkably quickly, become normal, a process psychologists describe as 'hedonic adaptation' (Brickman and Campbell, 1971; Frederick and Loewenstein, 1999). An ancestor who secured sufficient food on one day and thereafter concluded that the matter was permanently settled would presumably have been at something of a disadvantage two days later.
There is something simultaneously amusing and disturbing about this. Much of what we experience as personal dissatisfaction may reflect mechanisms that have served human beings extremely well. The problem is that a system built to keep us moving towards the next thing carries no corresponding mechanism for telling us that we already have enough, still less one that would let us pause, notice an achievement as a landmark, and recognise in the same moment that it will pass. Perhaps awareness of the ephemeral nature of achievement, and ultimately of ourselves, is part of what drives us onwards?
The Culture That Knows How To Use Our Restlessness
If restlessness is ancient and basic to our humanity, however, the cultural forms through which it is expressed are historically variable. Contemporary consumer culture did not invent dissatisfaction, but it has become extraordinarily sophisticated at directing it. Much advertising depends upon the proposition that some aspect of our present existence is inadequate and that a purchase might improve it (Richins, 1991, 1995). Social media offers an effectively inexhaustible supply of other lives against which our own can be measured, amplifying a much older human tendency towards social comparison (Festinger, 1954): other people's bodies, homes, careers, relationships, children, food and lifestyles ever tantalise us.
Professional life has its own versions of the same dynamic. Thus, we seek further promotion, another salary threshold, another qualification or another award. Academic life, with which I am particularly familiar, offers the next article, book, grant, keynote, role advancement or citation. None of these things is intrinsically objectionable; many represent genuine achievement and the proper fruits of sustained work. Yet it is surprisingly easy for yesterday's aspiration to become today's baseline.
Even personal development can become caught in the same logic. There are better versions of ourselves waiting to be constructed if only we acquire sufficient self-knowledge, discipline, resilience, emotional intelligence, mindfulness or whatever else happens currently to be prescribed. Wellbeing itself can become another thing at which we are expected to succeed. Perhaps contemporary culture's distinctive achievement has not been to make human beings restless, but to organise a remarkable amount of economic and professional life around a restlessness that was already there.
When Time Becomes Shorter
There is another dimension to this that interests me increasingly as I grow older. Restlessness changes when time begins to feel more visibly finite. For much of early adulthood, 'next' can appear almost limitless. There always appears to be further professional advancement ahead, another project, another decade of achievements envisioned. Even quite substantial decisions can be made against an implicit horizon of abundant future time. Eventually that assumption becomes harder to sustain, or it can be rudely interrupted by ill-health, redundancy or the sudden loss of someone close.
This need not result in diminished ambition; indeed, awareness of our finitude can intensify it. There may still be contributions to make, even work to accomplish, but in the face of life's vicissitudes a review of our own values is often necessary. The desire to make the remaining years count, but count differently, can become powerful precisely because one increasingly comes to realise that time is in reality finite.
This has become all too clear to me from my recent experiences of loss and redundancy. The knowledge that there are fewer decades ahead than behind has certainly focused my mind on what matters. Even so, it can also generate another kind of pressure, the feeling that time must now be used particularly well. Even mortality, then, can become recruited into the culture of achievement.
The language of legacy interests me for this reason. Wanting one's life to contribute something beyond oneself can be generous and indeed generative. Teaching, writing, parenting and grandparenting, creating new organisations and helping other people all extend consequences beyond the immediate self. Yet the desire to 'leave a mark' can also carry another impulse, a wish to ensure that something of us remains after we no longer do. Perhaps there is a point at which the desire to make our finite lives meaningful becomes a difficulty in accepting their finitude.
The Possibility Of Enough
Is this all resolvable? What would an alternative look like?
I am wary of an answer that simply reverses the argument and declares ambition, achievement or desire to be the problem. I have no wish to stop reading, writing, learning, working or imagining things I might yet do. Desire is part of being alive, and dissatisfaction can tell us important things. A job really can be intolerable. A relationship can need attention. An unrealised ambition may deserve pursuing. An injustice ought not to be accepted on the grounds that everyone should learn to be content. The more interesting question concerns whether we attain the capacity to experience moments in which nothing needs immediately to be improved, moments when we can be consciously satisfied.
There are forms of human activity whose value does not depend upon where they lead. Reading something without needing to turn it into an article, running without recording the time or the distance; having a conversation without needing an outcome; spending time with someone without treating the relationship as a project or having specific goals; looking at something beautiful without photographing it; allowing an experience to be sufficient unto itself.
This does not necessarily mean abandoning ambition. There may be an important distinction between pursuing something because its achievement promises to make us feel sufficient, and pursuing it because the activity itself is absorbing, pleasurable or worth doing. We might still want to write that book, run this race or become better at something, while being rather less dependent upon what its accomplishment will eventually say about us.
Religious traditions have developed practices around precisely this possibility. Contemplation, meditation and the idea of a Sabbath are each forms of practice and ritual that interrupt the ordinary flow of activity and call us to attend more fully to what is here and now. Rowan Williams's reflections on attention are helpful here. Drawing particularly on Simone Weil, he describes attention not simply as choosing something upon which to focus, but as suspending the dominant preoccupations of the ego so that we become more receptive to a reality independent of ourselves (Williams, 2023). Perhaps learning to experience life as enough requires something similar: a willingness to encounter what is present without immediately asking what it might produce, where it might lead or how it might be improved. That may sound simple, but I’ve found it to be extraordinarily challenging.
What Is The Wanting Telling Us?
There is an interesting question here for coaching too. Coaching can very easily become organised around aspiration. What do you want to achieve? Where do you want to be? What needs to change? What is your goal? What action will you take before we meet again? These can be useful questions. They can also, if we are not careful, reproduce precisely the assumption that the person sitting opposite us is a project requiring improvement.
Sometimes the desire for change needs to be taken entirely seriously. Someone may genuinely need another job, greater recognition, a difficult conversation, a different pattern of working or the courage to leave circumstances that no longer allow them to flourish. At other times it may be worth becoming curious about the wanting itself.
What do I imagine will happen when I obtain this?
How long do I expect that satisfaction to last and what would happen when it doesn't?
What would achieving it allow me to feel about myself?
Whose recognition am I seeking?
What is absent from my present life that I imagine the next thing will supply?
And perhaps the most difficult question of all: if nothing changed for a while, what would make the life I already have worth inhabiting?
These are not arguments against change. They are questions about the relationship we have with change and with the imagined future selves towards whom so much contemporary life is directed.
Arriving, Occasionally
Perhaps 'enoughness' cannot itself be made into a permanent state. The moment we make being content another objective to achieve, another discipline to master or another improved version of ourselves to construct, the old machinery has simply found a new objective. Nor do I imagine that human restlessness can fully and finally be solved. The Buddhist tradition would have considerably more to say about that than I can accommodate here, as would Christianity, and neither should be reduced to a technique for feeling better about one's life. I am interested in something more modest.
Perhaps there are moments when we can notice the perpetual movement towards what comes next and choose not immediately to follow it? Moments when the book being read does not have to lead to another book; when a job advert for an appealing post doesn't cause us to apply; when the people around us do not need to become anything other than who they presently are; when the life we are living is not experienced principally as preparation for some imagined future better one.
There will always be things worth changing and things worth becoming. Yet perhaps the challenge is to remain capable of becoming without making our present lives merely the raw material for whoever we hope to become next.
References and Further Reading
Augustine of Hippo. Confessions, Book I.
Brickman, P. and Campbell, D. T. (1971), 'Hedonic Relativism and Planning the Good Society', in M. H. Appley (ed.), Adaptation-Level Theory. New York: Academic Press, pp. 287–302.
Festinger, L. (1954), 'A Theory of Social Comparison Processes', Human Relations, 7(2), 117–140. https://doi.org/10.1177/001872675400700202
Frederick, S. and Loewenstein, G. (1999), 'Hedonic Adaptation', in D. Kahneman, E. Diener and N. Schwarz (eds), Well-Being: The Foundations of Hedonic Psychology. New York: Russell Sage Foundation, pp. 302–329.
Richins, M. L. (1991), 'Social Comparison and the Idealized Images of Advertising', Journal of Consumer Research, 18(1), 71–83. https://doi.org/10.1086/209242
Richins, M. L. (1995), 'Social Comparison, Advertising, and Consumer Discontent', American Behavioral Scientist, 38(4), 593–607. https://doi.org/10.1177/0002764295038004009
Williams, R. (2023), 'Attending to Attention', Zygon, 58(4), 1099–1111. https://doi.org/10.1111/zygo.12920
Wright, R. (2017), Why Buddhism Is True: The Science and Philosophy of Meditation and Enlightenment. New York: Simon & Schuster.