background on Dissatisfaction

In The Phantom Tollbooth , there is a special kind of food called “subtraction stew.” Produced by a mathemagician, this stew makes you hungrier after you’ve eaten it. Our three main characters don’t ...

The Clinical psychologist Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi describes how our minds, without stimuli, tends to quickly turn towards negative thoughts, our dissatisfaction. Contrary to what we tend to assume, ...

I have a photo of one of my children: on a day of pure sunshine, he is running down the hillside, leading with his chest, his smile and stride wide as his speed picks up. Running is pure delight. Agai...

Since the advent of widespread public education in the West, it seems that many people express dissatisfaction with their schooling more often than they share positive experiences. This makes it all t...

I am always intrigued by how few Americans know the account of what has been called the most important unknown moment in American history and the single most important gathering ever held in the Unite...

In this tragic world, we are surrounded by discontented people. Every minute of the day, it is possible to see evidence of this restless discontentment in the way people respond to circumstances. Peop...

Gregg Easterbrook wrote about this in a 2003 book called The Progress Paradox. Easterbrook’s subtitle was How Life Gets Better While People Feel Worse. He describes how affluent we have become—​​​bett...

Years ago Wendy and I were out to dinner and she observed that something was different about our marriage in recent years, something good. She asked me if I had any insight into what it was. After ref...

In this excerpt, musician and author Ginny Owens shares a childhood exercise that only makes specific what all of us as human beings struggle with, the desire for wholeness: I wish you could know my ...

Frustration is something that does not exist—except within the self. It translates my world to me through the filter of my own need to control it. Frustration becomes the space we put between ourselve...

Creatures are not born with desires unless satisfaction for those desires exists. A baby feels hunger; well, there is such a thing as food. A duckling wants to swim; well, there is such a thing as wat...

Awesome stuff never satisfies. Nothing in the entire physical, created world can give rest, peace, identity, meaning, purpose, or lasting contentment to your awe-craving heart. Looking to stuff to sat...

Judgment and joy don’t go well together – no, judgment leads to grumbling. I’m sure you’ve met people in your life who are hard to please – maybe even your parents, or your boss. People for whom n...

Contentment is when we tell the Shepherd that His provision is enough for all our physical and material needs. If our old car gimps down the road, that is fine. If we get a shiny newer auto with less ...

It happens sooner or later in every relationship: someone will let you down. We have a term for the earliest stages of a relationship: the “honeymoon phase”—that rosy time period when everything but d...

Joy’s trick is to supply  Dry lips with what can cool and slake,  Leaving them dumbstruck also with an  ache Nothing can satisfy.

Sad will be the day for every man when he becomes absolutely contented with the life he is living, with the thoughts that he is thinking, with the deeds that he is doing, when there is not forever bea...

Thomas Merton describes those who never experience the gift of a contemplative life. His explanation for why some people never experience this can be found in his book, New Seeds of Contemplation: [T...

Another form of unholy unhurry that many of us have heard little about is acedia. Derived from the Greek a (for “not”) and keedos (meaning “to care”), acedia is ultimately a failure of love. It’s a pl...

You follow your desires wherever they take you, and you approve of yourself so long as you are not obviously hurting anyone else. You figure that if the people around you seem to like you, you must be...

Charles Darwin, known for his chronic complaining, was at his happiest when he had something to criticize. One evening, he and his wife attended a banquet where everything seemed to go wrong. The spee...

The more I use stuff to fill up my hungers, the more distance I put between God and myself. And as I continue to fill up my infinite hungers with finite things (when I run through the Starbucks drive-...

Comparison is the root of most of the misery we feel in life. Comparison makes it impossible to view ourselves from any sort of godly perspective. It is an absolute snare for the soul. Consider what c...

Our culture is still stuck on viewing marriage through the lens of happiness first and foremost—defining happiness by romantic intensity and sexual chemistry. Since the 1960s, sociologists have found ...

A therapist once told me that the most common complaint he heard from his patients was the feeling that they didn’t belong. The feeling of being an imposter, or of being outside things, of not fitting...

Most quarrels are due to a misunderstanding, and the misunderstanding is due to our failure to appreciate the other person’s point of view. It is more natural to us to talk than to listen, to argue th...

In one of the classic scenes from Charles Dickens’ novel Oliver Twist, the misfortunate young orphan, Oliver, is stuck in a workhouse, laboring for long hours and getting barely enough gruel to keep h...

The soul can also manifest physical symptoms of need. I like to think of it this way: Just like my stomach growls when I’m hungry for physical food, my spirit tends to growl when I’m in need of spirit...

In a 2010 study called “A Wandering Mind Is an Unhappy Mind” (gulp), Harvard psychologists Matthew Killingsworth and Daniel Gilbert developed an iPhone app to survey the thoughts, feelings, and action...

In life, whenever someone achieves success, criticism usually follows—regardless of their skill or the effort they’ve invested. An old story illustrates this truth. A woman crafted artificial fruit so...