Jamie Varon

Radically Content offers easy methods and effective tactics to help you break free from the cycle of worry, fear, and panic.

Being Satisfied in an Endlessly Dissatisfied World

Radically Content

Claudine

How can the pinnacle of the human experience, the one that we all compare and contrast with, be so inaccessible to most of the world’s population?

A value system that places emphasis on a hierarchy that purports that as long as someone is “below” us, we are doing okay in life. We take this societal value system on, and it becomes synthesized as our own truth. We ingest and absorb it. 

People feel like failures for not thriving in a broken world, in broken systems, in corruption, in a world where many countries elevate profit above humanity.

I am existentially in crisis most of the time. But I am also stubbornly in love with life. It’s a paradox I’ve been trying to reconcile for thirty-six years now. A buzzing between there must be more than this and I must make the most of this.

...contentment is not about living without dreams or hopes. Contentment, to me, is not complacency. It’s not settling. It’s about living fully expressed, not delaying my joy for the promise of some future check mark that society has told me to want. When you are content with where you are, it doesn’t make you less motivated. It makes you motivated by the right things. It makes you motivated by love, passion, enjoyment, genuine desire—and you aren’t striving for worthiness.

Contentment isn’t giving up. It’s a foundation.

Without any knowledge that this dissatisfaction is being pumped into the very air we breathe, it’s hard to know what is yours to carry—and what is something that has been ingrained over the years.

What ends justify the means, if the means are unhappiness, loss of time, loss of enjoyment? What ends are more important than our well-being, our relationships, our mental, physical, and emotional health?

These are the questions I could never answer. Maybe that was the point. Maybe the unanswerable nature of these questions is what made them so tantalizing and elusive. Maybe that’s how dissatisfaction breeds into productivity.

That’s the genius of the dissatisfaction—there’s no real way to cultivate the opposite. It’s a losing game. We’re not ever supposed to find our way out of the labyrinth. It’s meant to keep us confused and searching and chasing and striving and hustling and proving. The dissatisfaction does not have a solution. It’s an issue with many heads and tangents. It’s meant to be unobtainable. It’s a problem that is designed to stay a problem. It keeps us addicted to solutions that will never work.

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