Are we satisfied?

I don’t know if I’m ready to declare this a problem. Maybe it is. I find the shape of things to be less certain of late, so I’m going in the direction of questions. Personally, I like questions.

It pleases me to think of myself as a simple bear. It doesn’t take a lot to make me happy.

This is at once both true and absolute falsehood. As I know it probably is for most people. Because, for the most part, people are not all that simple. (Nor are they bears, if you really want to be technical about it.)

I have an ongoing exchange with the Cats’ Father about how easy we are to please. I take pleasure in some incredibly small, almost pedestrian things, but I am fundamentally not a glass-half-full person. I also think the glass may be chipped.

On the other paw, the Cats’ Father thinks the heavens have poured their blessings on him if the toast isn’t burnt.

I was reading a thing in Scientific American, a 2007 piece called Why It’s So Hard To Be Happy (more recent literature bears out this thinking), and it turns out we’re not really wired for a whole lot of satisfaction:

“We have… inherited a tendency to notice the negative more readily than the positive… negative changes may have signaled danger…So the natural human condition is to take positive experiences for granted and to focus on the bothersome aspects of life,” Michael Wiederman wrote.

There’s a lot out there on what makes us happy and what doesn’t. And far too much on how to be more happy or more satisfied.

What I want to know – and am getting no help interrogating – is why some people seem to be relatively easy to please and for others it’s well-nigh impossible.

There is something bigger than the matter of easy versus difficult, to wit: is one better and one less to be desired?

See, I don’t believe that it is inherently good to be easy to please. I do not think the person whose response is always, “I’m good with anything,” when you ask what they want for dinner is the most helpful person in the room.

I’m also not a fan of the person who looks the menu up and down and decides to ask if the kitchen can be prevailed upon to make – not an adjustment, not a variation – but an entirely new dish they once had at some completely different restaurant.

These are extremes. But I know many people will find neither of these positions extreme. Surely there is more extreme. Of course there is, but this is a family newspaper and there are some things we cannot write about when we’re using food as an example.

Nor do you want to start any sort of online research that involves the word “satisfaction.” Sexual frustration took on a whole new meaning for me. You ask one question about satisfaction and you turn up a zillion pages of profound academic research on every conceivable way you can look at this bedevilling matter.

Bizarrely, you’ll also get a whole lot of religious sites. Bible readings and all.

This made me very nervous about following a line of questions about whether or not one is easily “pleased.” That seemed like asking for trouble.

The point of wanting to know about this at all is twofold: first, I want to know about a lot of things; and second, that satisfaction-happiness connection, all that literature that’s out there, it’s important.

It is true that I find great joy in collecting rocks and taking pictures of leaves.

It is equally true that there are parts of my emotional, creative and intellectual life that feel woefully empty at times and nothing anyone says or does can fill it by so much as a drop. It’s as though I can’t let myself find comfort. And it is so very dark.

Far, far away in another world, someone – not the Cat’s Father – a bright, kind woman who deserves the world of good, consistently settles for just about anything. Any scrap of kindness, notice, the least amount of humanity a person can live on.

And she’s ever so happy. She does not feel her existence undignified. She does not chafe.

Yes, I know all these examples are subjective. But if we’re taking about what fulfils us, everything is.

What I still want to know is, are we ready to ask ourselves if, when it comes to being satisfied, does it come to us too readily or not enough?

Remember to talk to your doctor or therapist if you want to know more about what you read here. In many cases, there’s no single solution or diagnosis to a mental health concern. Many people suffer from more than one condition.