Humans suck. We are impossible to please. We have so many conflicting needs and desires, it’s a marvel that we can even wipe the correct ass.
I’ve long written about how humans evolved to be constantly dissatisfied in some way. I’ve written about how, in life, it’s impossible to escape suffering. In fact, in one of the most popular sections of my book The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck, Disappointment Panda says: “Life is essentially an endless series of problems—the solution to one problem is merely the creation of the next. Don’t hope for a life without problems. Hope for a life full of good problems.”
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Can we ever win? Or are we doomed to always be dissatisfied? Is there never a perfect amount of pizza that we can eat without hating ourselves?
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Many of our biological functions are homeostatic.3 Similar to the thermostat, if your body gets too hot, it releases sweat to cool itself off. If it gets too cold, it shivers to warm itself up. Other mechanisms regulate hunger and satiety, sleep and wakefulness, and so on.
And when, for whatever reason, we break outside those ranges—our blood sugar spikes out of control, or our body temperature drops to a dangerous level—the entire system threatens to break down.
Homeostatic processes emerge everywhere—in biological ecosystems, financial markets, within businesses and political systems, and, as it turns out, they often emerge in our cognitive functions.
Here’s a mini-blow to your ego… what you experience as “you”—i.e., the traits and preferences that seem to differentiate you from everyone else—are arguably homeostatic functions.
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So biological homeostasic processes allow us to function and eat and poop and perceive the world. From these perceptions and experiences we develop psychological feedback mechanisms that then result in psychological homeostasis.
The homeostatic properties of our personality explain why Disappointment Panda’s lesson is so true. There’s no “perfect” amount of socializing or cleanliness or friendliness. We are constantly pinging back and forth within a range of acceptability. We love seeing friends… until we’re sick of them. Then we sit at home alone… until we’re sick of being alone, so we call up some friends. And on it goes. Much like eating and pooping, many of our psychological experiences are cyclical in nature.
But most of us, by the time we’re adults, understand our own cycles within ourselves. We intuit when we should back off and have some “self-care” time. We’ve also learned when to push ourselves out of our comfort zones or maybe make a few sacrifices for long-term gain.
Yet, we still struggle to remain content with our lives.
This is because we operate on more than just our simple psychological desires. We also create meaning around those desires, and this meaning is also subject to over-stepping in one direction or another. Thus, from our psychological equilibrium emerge philosophical homeostatic functions—feedback mechanisms notifying us when we are hollowing out our self-worth like a bowl of ice cream on one end and being a totally narcissistic fuckwit on the other.
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Just as our biology has feedback mechanisms to keep us within a healthy range physically, and our psychology has feedback mechanisms to keep us from hating everybody and everything emotionally, I propose that we have intellectual feedback mechanisms. These are ever-evolving belief systems in place that respond to maintain a sense of satisfaction and meaning in our lives. If we can manage our belief systems and assumptions to promote a philosophical balance, then we can develop a resilient and persistent state of happiness and satisfaction throughout our lives—i.e., we can be content.
Below are three sets of conflicting needs that everyone experiences throughout their lives. We experience these conflicting needs as sorts of paradoxes—unresolvable contradictions in our own motivations that feel impossible to win. Instead of getting everything we want, we ping back and forth, sacrificing one need for the other and vice-versa, never fully satisfied, always full of anxiety and angst.
These paradoxes are universal in principle, yet play out differently in each individual life because we approach them with different experiences, desires, and beliefs.
The Paradox of Control: Stability vs Change
The need for a stable and predictable environment is a core human need. What frightens us or gives us anxiety is not when bad things happen—it’s when we’re not sure whether a bad thing will happen or not. When something goes wrong, at least we have the power to fix it. We’re still in control. But when life becomes unpredictable—when the house is dark and there’s a mysterious sound upstairs—we feel as though we’ve lost control.
We seek to make our environments and our lives predictable. We lie to ourselves and misremember details in order to give us a greater feeling that we control our fate. We create routines, build habits, and organize our lives around a few repetitive, knowable goals or ideas.
Obsessively controlling everything in our life has an unfortunate side effect: it makes life fucking boring. The same old thing, day after day, week after week, for months on end, the mindless repetition begins to challenge our sense that our actions are actually meaningful. After all, this can’t be all that life is, right? Driving the same route to work, day after day. Saying the same things. Doing the same things. There’s must be something more.
Suddenly, the stable routines feel stifling. You feel yourself suffocating. You have this unbearable need to break out and do something drastic or irrational—to go climb a mountain even though you’re 50 pounds overweight. Or to crush up your kids’ Flintstone Vitamins and smoke them.
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To resolve the paradox of control, we must pursue both stability and change simultaneously. That means consciously changing our lives gradually and reasonably. That means setting goals. That means incremental changes done with purpose. That means creating smart habits. That means imagining the person you desire to be and taking small, baby-steps towards that person.
That means practicing self-discipline.
Obviously, some people will desire more stability than change and others will desire more change than stability—after all, everyone’s thermostats are set to different temperatures. So, the correct amount of self-discipline for you might be different from me and vice-versa. But the principle remains: we achieve both stability and change through steady, controlled discipline.
The Paradox of Choice: Commitment versus Freedom
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Sartre’s whole thing was this: we’re all going to die, and if we’re all being honest about it, there’s really no evidence that any of this shit matters. In fact, the whole notion of “mattering” in the first place is something made up in our minds—a choice, if you will. We are each, from moment to moment and experience to experience, choosing what we wish to matter in our lives, thus giving our own lives meaning.
Sartre believed that to truly generate a life of meaning for oneself, you had to be willing to risk death (as in, fight some motherfucking Nazis). But he also noted that this willingness to choose something to die for is absolutely horrifying and impossibly difficult for most of us most of the time. We avoid this responsibility to choose what matters for ourselves. We distract ourselves and numb ourselves to it.
It’s for this reason that Sartre wrote that freedom was a kind of curse or burden that we must all carry with us. He said that ultimately, this need to commit to something in the face of freedom crippled many of us emotionally, that it was the greatest challenge any of us would ever face.
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The core of Sartre’s work is an inherent tension—or paradox—in how we create meaning for ourselves in the world. On the one hand, we are free—we are free to choose what to do, what to believe, and what to think. This freedom grants us the opportunity to create meaning for ourselves and from a wide selection of potential thoughts and experiences, we choose what to make of ourselves.
But this freedom can also become overwhelming. We can become addicted to infinite options, to the constant possibility of bigger, better, more, more, more. Beyond a certain point, freedom seems to discourage commitment because we are too aware of everything that we are potentially giving up.
But without that commitment to something, our life begins to feel empty and pointless… It’s all just superficial stuff that accumulates and then quickly serves no purpose.
It’s only by rejecting alternatives, by giving up certain freedoms through making commitments, that our freedom becomes meaningful.
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Freedom is only meaningful when it is given up. And we give up freedom by making commitments.
But just as we can be overwhelmed by our freedom, we can also become overwhelmed by our commitments. When we over-commit, we can feel trapped, as though we’ve lost our identity. When we’re over-committed, we lose the sense of freedom of choice—and without the freedom of choice, then commitments lose their significance.
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Much like the paradox of change vs stability was resolved by merging the two extremes, here the only way to resolve the paradox of choice is by committing to actions that multiply our freedoms—that is, making a commitment to our own growth.
The ability to commit to exercise makes your body more capable and adaptable, expanding your physical freedom. The commitment of education grants you the greater freedoms provided by the knowledge you learn. The commitment to certain relationships helps you emotionally mature into an individual that is more able to flourish.
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The Paradox of Relationships: Individuality vs Conformity
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We all want to be connected with others. It’s a fundamental human need. To be accepted, we mimic and follow others. We conform. We look for a group or crowd to be a part of. This helps us feel secure and as though we are loved and needed.
But if we conform too much—i.e., if we completely surrender our individual identity to another person or to a group—then we lose a sense of who we are. And because we have no sense of who we are or what we want, that surrender renders the relationship meaningless.
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But there’s an opposite approach to human relationships, as well. We can try to be completely different from everybody else. We can become contrarian. We can wear our hair in a weird way and stop showering and adopt a small pack of feral wolves and speak about ourselves in the third person.
This desperate desire for individuality is motivated by the […] desire to feel important. […] In the case of the weirdo individualist, they seek to feel important by being incomparable to anyone else.
By rejecting and being rejected by others, they write a narrative in their minds that they are rejected because they matter. And the more they are rejected, the more people will have to pay attention to them and engage with them.
But the weirdo individualist runs into the paradox from the other end: by trying to be unlike everyone else, he or she just conforms… to other non-conformists.
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Healthy relationships require a fragile balance—the ability to identify with someone or something, while also being able to identify without someone or something. It’s the ability to be yourself, for yourself, while also being accepted by others. Or, as I put it in my book Models: you will always care what people think about you, the trick isn’t to stop caring—the trick is to correctly prioritize how you feel about yourself first over what people think.
We resolve the paradox of relationships through acceptance—both the acceptance of oneself (I will be different and yet, I will also be the same) as well as the acceptance of others (they will be different and yet, they will also be the same). It’s the ability to recognize yourself both as an individual and as someone who conforms to their relationships without identifying too much with either one.
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