Why Wanting Less Can Be Good

What I read: How To Want Less by Arthur C. Brooks. Published February 8, 2022.

Lately I have been on a “less” journey. Less commitments. Less stuff. Less financial complexity. Less commuting. Less just about everything but love, close friends, and self-fulfillment because I always want more of those in my life.

I have read other writings by Arthur C. Brooks and he has an insightful mind. I always learn something when I read his work.

Ultimately, we all want to experience satisfaction in life. I sure do. I’m sure you do too. But that solid feeling of true satisfaction can be elusive.

As we wind our way through life, I explained, satisfaction—the joy from fulfillment of our wishes or expectations—is evanescent. No matter what we achieve, see, acquire, or do, it seems to slip from our grasp.

The life-improvement directive to reduce, to lessen so many of the trappings of our existence, is nothing new. Thoughts leaders, spiritual thinkers, and self-improvement types have espoused the power of less for centuries. More recently the minimalism movement has been popularized.

For what it’s worth, I’m not a fan of the minimalism label. To me it’s just the functioning of the age-old principle of simplicity. Simple is usually better. In design. In business processes. In just about everything. So, I frame my own minimalism desires using the simplification verbiage to blunt the tendency for it to be discounted as just one more fad trend.

Brooks explains how he had spent much of his life pursuing many of the things we’re acculturated to want such as accomplishment, fame, and other social cues that signal to ourselves and to the external world that we are indeed successful.

I’d devoted my life to climbing those rungs. I was still devoting my life to climbing—beavering away 60 to 80 hours a week to accomplish the next thing, all the while terrified of losing the last thing. The costs of that kind of existence are exceedingly obvious, but it was only when I looked back at my list that I genuinely began to question the benefits—and to think seriously about the path I was walking.

When I read that paragraph, I immediately thought about the book Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman that I wrote about in Your Life Will Be Absurdly Brief. As we grind away day-to-day at working toward goals we’ve convinced ourselves are important, we tend to forget about the brevity of life. Add 60-80 hours of work week after week together and you’ve reduced what’s left of the approximately 4,000 weeks we have to walk the planet. Time is something we can never get more of with each passing second chipping away at what’s left for us to do our thing whatever that thing might be.

Then I read the paragraph that hit me like the proverbial ton of bricks.

Your goals are probably very different from mine, and perhaps your lifestyle is too. But the trap is the same. Everyone has dreams, and they beckon with promises of sweet, lasting satisfaction if you achieve them. But dreams are liars. When they come true, it’s … fine, for a while. And then a new dream appears.

So true! For decades I have been someone who has worshipped at the altar of accomplishment, a tendency I have come to learn is not always healthy. I dream. I fantasize. I write all those dreams and fantasies down as if the writing down will somehow magically cement their inevitability. Even more importantly, I deceive myself to believe that accomplishing that next big thing will somehow finally bring about a deep sense of lasting satisfaction. It doesn’t. Rather, I revel in whatever I’ve accomplished for a few hours, maybe a day or two, and then that high of the completion of one goal subsides and I go chasing the next accomplishment-fueled high. That frustrating cycle never ends, unless we decide it ends.

Brooks explains that while we can achieve brief bursts of satisfaction, it’s fleeting. Explaining that nature’s homeostasis concept applies not only to its original physiological interpretations for regulating bodily functions, it also applies to our survival generally. All living systems are programmed to survive by maintaining stable conditions as best they can. The return to an emotional baseline after the briefly satisfying feeling of pleasure, success, or accomplishment is a built-in feature, not a bug.

The unending race against the headwinds of homeostasis has a name: the “hedonic treadmill.” No matter how fast we run, we never arrive.

Much like the addiction cycle keeps an addict unsuccessfully chasing the first substance high, the same principle applies to how our emotions work. While the cycle encompasses both positive and negative emotions, for primordial reasons Brooks explains that positive emotions are more likely to succumb to a quicker return to a homeostasis baseline than negative emotions. So, our brief feelings of satisfaction can feel more quickly squelched than our negative emotions. Sometimes our inherent natures really do work against us.

The entire situation seems dire and hopeless at times. Commercials continue to pummel us with messaging that their product or service will finally deliver happiness and satisfaction to our doorstep. We observe our paychecks and bank accounts growing (hopefully) and think those dollars will allow us to trade them for happiness, but they mostly don’t. The award given, the winning of a contest, or being publicly lauded injects a quick smidgen of happiness and satisfaction, but it’s brief.

“The nature of [adaptation] condemns men to live on a hedonic treadmill,” the psychologists Philip Brickman and Donald T. Campbell wrote in 1971, “to seek new levels of stimulation merely to maintain old levels of subjective pleasure, to never achieve any kind of permanent happiness or satisfaction.”

I you are like me and you’ve fallen prey to the hedonic treadmill trap, don’t beat yourself up too much. There is a reason these tendencies are so pervasive.

According to evolutionary psychology, our tendency to strive for more is perfectly understandable. Throughout most of human history, starvation loomed closer than it does, for the most part, today. A “rich” caveman had a few extra animal skins and arrowheads, and maybe a few piles of seeds and dried fish to spare. With this plenty, he might survive a bad winter.

Our troglodyte ancestors didn’t just want to make it through the winter, though; they had bigger ambitions. They wanted to find allies and mates too, with the goal (whether conscious or not) of passing on their genes. And what would make that possible? Among other things, the accumulation of animal skins, demonstrating greater competence, prowess, and attractiveness than the hominid in the next cave over.

Not much has changed, sadly. Research has repeatedly shown that our tendencies to acquire and accumulate persist. Even when we’re awash in more than enough of what we need, our vestigial urges manifest as part of the software that has been installed in our brains since ancient times.

Our primal biological wiring fuels our cultural obsession with comparison. As Brooks points out, success is relative. So, we don’t just hop on the hedonic treadmill to run as fast as others. Instead, we attempt to run just a bit faster. It’s not sustainable. It always ends with us running to exhaustion with a rival, literal or figurative, to whom we’ve compared ourselves breezing ahead past us.

Keeping up with the Joneses is ultimately futile. When those Joneses increasingly worship money, fame, and excessive abundance of material wealth and pleasure, we will never keep up. It’s like entering a race with the intention of winning even though we know there’s a runner alongside us we already know will run faster and win. Entering the race itself is the mistake. Let others run it and exhaust themselves to unhappiness. Better for us to sit on the sidelines and let others pursue the unattainable while we go about our more satisfying lives.

At one point in the article I think Brooks hits on the most important point regarding the pursuit of satisfaction, that Mother Nature is not on our side.

We live in a time when we are regularly counseled to get back to nature, to our long-ago past—in our diets, our sense of communal obligation, and more. But if our goal is happiness that endures, following our natural urges does not help us, in the main. That is Mother Nature’s cruel hoax. Happiness doesn’t help propagate the species, so nature doesn’t select for it. If you conflate intergenerational survival with happiness, that’s your problem, not nature’s.

In fact, our natural state is dissatisfaction, punctuated by brief moments of satisfaction. You might not like the hedonic treadmill, but Mother Nature thinks it’s pretty great. She likes watching you strive to achieve an elusive goal, because strivers get the goods—even if they don’t enjoy them for long. More mates, better mates, better chances of survival for our children—these ancient mandates are responsible for much of the code that runs incessantly in the deep recesses of our brains. It doesn’t matter whether you’ve found your soul mate and would never stray; the algorithms designed to get us more mates (or allow us to make an upgrade) continue whirring, which is why you still want to be attractive to strangers. Neurobiological instinct—which we experience as dissatisfaction—is what drives us forward.

Another interesting point Brooks makes is that religion peddles satisfaction by another name, heaven. Place your faith in the religion and you’ll reap the reward of heaven (satisfaction) upon your death, even if your life was led in such as way as to have been miserable otherwise.

Ironically, since Brooks points out Catholicism specifically as one of the religions offering detailed specificity about their path to heaven and therefore satisfaction that lasts, it is Catholic priest Thomas Aquinas he references for wisdom on the subject.

Aquinas identified the satisfaction problem as caused by misplaced goals. In Aquinas’s case, he believed this was false idols such as money, power, and pleasure distracting us from what he believes to be the true source of long-lasting satisfaction, God.

As a pragmatic atheist, I can put aside the religious and theistic source of Aquinas’s contention and still agree with it by substituting his version of God with my non-faith perspective of a humanistic spirituality. Aquinas’s words ring true if we accept them in a more generalized sense.

In the desire for wealth and for whatsoever temporal goods … when we already possess them, we despise them, and seek others … The reason of this is that we realize more their insufficiency when we possess them: and this very fact shows that they are imperfect, and the sovereign good does not consist therein.

Brooks references the Buddhist concept of attachment being the primary source of our woes. I’m not a Buddhist but many of their spiritual teachings resonate with me including this one. Our lack of satisfaction is directly related to our natural attachment to things that turn out to be entirely inadequate to quench our satisfaction thirst.

There is nothing inherently wrong with money, possessions, or fame, but it’s them as attachments, as ends themselves rather than being means to an end, that manifests as unhappiness and dissatisfaction because they will never truly satisfy if they are made our goals.

As an attempt at one solution to this satisfaction quandary of life, Brooks uses the metaphor of the National Palace Museum in Taiwan. The museum boasts 700,000 historic items. It is a tangible example of abundance. When Brooks visited the museum, he knew he could not examine everything in it. So, he hired a guide to show him a few famous pieces and explain their significance. The guide remarked as they gazed upon one of the pieces, a massive Qing dynasty jade carving of the Buddha, that the piece was a good illustration of how Eastern and Western views of art diverge. The guide said that rather than the Western view of art as an empty space like a canvas ready to be created, the Eastern view is that the art, like a block of jade, already exists and the job of artists is to simply reveal it.

Art mirrors life, and therein lies a potential solution to the satisfaction dilemma.

Then, I read the words that validated so much of what I’ve been contemplating lately as an older person planning the rest of my years.

As we grow older in the West, we generally think we should have a lot to show for our lives—a lot of to our lives—a lot of trophies. According to numerous Eastern philosophies, this is backwards. As we age, we shouldn’t accumulate more to represent ourselves, but rather strip things away to find our true selves—and thus, to find happiness and peace.

Brooks concisely explains the true formula for satisfaction as not getting what you want, but rather as what you have divided by what you want.

Satisfaction = what you have ÷ what you want

The secret to satisfaction is definitely not to increase haves because that will never work. The satisfaction derived from more haves lasts but a moment at best. We will run on the treadmill forever, and much like a treadmill it won’t take us anywhere meaningful. But if we manage our wants, we might give ourselves a chance for a better, more satisfied life.

Brooks offers his readers three practical suggestions to better achieve satisfaction. He has developed these habits in his own life, habits grounded in philosophy and social-science research, and offers them to us for consideration. I’ll briefly list and explain them, but Brooks does such a beautiful job of doing so that I hope you read his original source article. He articulates these better than I do.

First tip, go from prince to sage. What Brooks means by this is that satisfaction is not attained by garnering high social or professional status or extreme wealth and comfort, but rather by helping other people. I can attest to this working in my life. When I do something to help another, whether it’s one person or an entire community, it feels great and that satisfaction sticks with me.

Second tip, make a reverse bucket list. We’re often encouraged to make a bucket list of wants and desires by many proclaimed self-help experts. This breeds attachment, which breeds dissatisfaction, and the dissatisfaction grows as the list grows.

To create a reverse bucket list, first create the usual bucket list and allow your most base desires to be honest on the page. Be entirely truthful with yourself. Then, picture yourself five years in the future as a happy, at peace person living a life of purpose and meaning.

Now make a list of the forces that would result in being that happy person. What you’ll add to your reverse bucket list will inevitably be intrinsic sources of happiness, those things that emanate from within such as family, friends, and meaningful work that helps others.

Compare the typical bucket list you’ve created to the reverse bucket list of happiness forces and you’ll more readily commit to pursuing the things on the reverse bucket list. There is nothing inherently evil or wrong about many of the things on typical bucket lists. But if their attainment is to make others admire or envy us, those items are suspect.

Third tip, get smaller. This relates to another post I wrote, Reducing To Improve. I’m on a quest lately to reduce the stuff in my life as well as commitments and overly busy agendas. As a sidenote, I recommend watching The Story of Stuff since it might give you a different perspective on our consumerism culture and our collective obsession with getting more stuff.

Anyway, what Brooks means by get smaller is primarily to pay attention to smaller and smaller things. Focus on one thing at a time, even the most basic of life’s activities like washing the dishes.

We all know (hopefully) multitasking is a myth. We can’t multitask as much as we say with confident bluster that we can. Science has proven we can’t. Focus on one thing at a time. Fully enjoy and experience it, no matter how simple a thing it is. Those moments will endure in our memories and result in deeper satisfaction than flitting from thing to thing without fully experiencing or appreciating any of them. Perhaps identify something rather ordinary each day on which you’ll focus, taking in the beauty and meaningful experience of it, even if it’s something as simple as staring at a flower for a few moments.

Brooks’s entire article is worth reading. It prompted me to add his book, From Strength to Strength: Finding Success, Happiness, and Deep Purpose in the Second Half of Life, to my reading queue.

I’ll leave you with a quote from Mahatma Gandhi that I think illustrates much of what Brooks says in his article.

Satisfaction lies in the effort, not in the attainment. Full effort is fully victory.

May the rest of your day and life be happy and satisfying.

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