Who remembers this quote by John Lennon?
“When I went to school, they asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. I wrote down ‘happy’. They told me I didn’t understand the assignment, and I told them they didn’t understand life.”
When I heard this as a teenager, I loved that quote. But as you get older, you realise that happiness is just one temporary emotion among many others that are equally important. Chasing happiness can often disbalance other positive feelings, which impacts our overall mental health.
Two such emotions are satisfaction and fulfilment.
Satisfaction is easier to achieve. You feel satisfied when you gain knowledge, when you complete your chores, pay your bills, or when in general your life feels comfortable.
The problem with happiness and satisfaction is that they do not last on their own. To keep those emotions in the long term, we need continuous fulfilment.
Fulfilment comes when you apply knowledge to achieve something new. It means taking risks, potentially failing but eventually progressing in new skills. For example, if you start learning to write, it would be going from gaining knowledge, such as how to engage the audience (satisfaction), to applying it and writing an improved work (fulfilment). The result does not need to be excellent from the start; it takes months, if not years, to become proficient in some skills. But to feel fulfilled, you only need to see progress.
The problem with many people is that they are deprived of fulfilment once they leave school.
There may be a temporary spike when you start a new job, but you will stall unless you find the perfect role or change careers sufficiently quickly to progress at a decent rate.
This deprivation of fulfilment leads to many negatives:
– Victim mentality – “It’s X’s fault that I cannot achieve fulfilment.”
– Depression – “I’m helpless to achieve fulfilment.”
– Inadequacy – I’m not capable of achieving fulfilment.
– Addiction – in the forms of trying to gamble your way to shortcut fulfilment, using substances to numb yourself from the lack of fulfilment, or exaggerating so much on temporary feelings of happiness and satisfaction that you forget about fulfilment.
The issue is further complicated, given that most people need more self-awareness to figure out that lack of fulfilment is the cause.
Why?
Because marketers have crafted the perfect psychological advert of all time – chase happiness and satisfaction. They have made everyone believe that the true reason to live is to experience endless pleasure, happiness and satisfaction. These emotions are easier to fulfil, and as many purchases are emotional, getting a significant spike in short-term emotions is a compelling marketing strategy.
I’ll give you one example. Do you believe people must travel to become cultured, experience the world, and so on? No.
Most people do it because other people do it, and it has become a socially acceptable competition on who has travelled the most and has the best Instagram pics. How many people truly experience the culture of a city or a country if they don’t spend at least a few months living there like the locals do?
I’m not attacking travelling. I love to travel myself. It makes you feel happy and satisfied, even if it is just a holiday or without becoming deeply involved with the local customs.
What I’m getting at is that we don’t need it for our lives to be happy, satisfied AND fulfilled. The travel industry however, has taken advantage of this newfound source of pleasure and has almost made it as if travelling is absolutely necessary, if not the most important thing in life. Just look at how happy some of our grandparents or people in developing countries who may have never travelled. Is spending money on travelling better than many other self-indulgent activities? Yes. But it is still self-indulging and too much of it without doing other things alongside it will cause a shortness of fulfilment.
Many people self-destruct to grasp some level of fulfilment
Given that fulfilment is the application of knowledge to achieve something new. You can do the more difficult but positive fulfilment, which is continuously chasing new skills and achievements in life.
Or you can do destructive methods. Destructive methods are where you mess up an area of your life so that you can reconstruct it and get a small dose of fulfilment. This is easier because you still stay within your comfort zone. This destructive behaviour is often why people struggle to lose weight or maintain a good fitness level. It’s why people get stuck in toxic relationships or move from one exciting fling to the next. It’s why their business gets stuck and never grows.
In the short term, the above destructive behaviour feels good. But long term, it makes us crave real fulfilment even more. It’s why people have a crisis and do not feel like their life has a purpose.
What is the solution?
One of the most common solutions, which is not ideal but does the job, is having kids. Kids are the “easiest” way to achieve long-term fulfilment. The problem is that some people using this solution often need more time to be ready to be parents. Or fulfilment is their only motivation for having kids. This can often lead to projecting expectations onto their kids, blaming them for the inevitable negative periods that occasionally occur to everyone, and so on, impacting the kids.
The other solutions are competitive. Fulfilment is often directly linked with competition.
You can create a business and be competitive in the money you earn, the respect, and the goodwill that you do. You can compete in sports, whether at a professional level or not. You can compete in research and be the first person who discovers new things. You can compete in whatever interests you if it challenges and takes you out of your comfort zone.
Healthy competition is necessary for long-term fulfilment needs and ensures that you do not fall into negative states of mind or destructive behaviours. One way or another, you will get at least some dose of fulfilment, but if you do not choose the positive path, the negative will automatically take over.
