false heart 9 (disappointment 2)

Why can we never be satisfied?

Is anything ever really what it’s cracked up to be? Doesn’t everything -- and everyone -- lose its luster in a very short, predictable amount of time? More and more it seems like adult Americans are resembling our childhood selves not on Christmas morning, but on Christmas afternoon. We continually live out that un-magical moment when the toys were all suddenly not so great anymore: the broken thread between anticipation and reality.

We live in an age of perpetual disappointment. And it makes sense: so much has been, well, disappointing lately. This is a time when all the old institutions of yore, all the rocks upon which our parents and grandparents built everything in which they believed are crumbling:

• Marriage has become a temporary hiatus from being alone, which ends up lonelier than being single for many people.

• The notion of the church offering a window into the divine is a cruel joke.

• Democratic government has been hollowed out and co-opted in the most blatant terms for the men and corporations for whom it has always worked, just never this unashamedly.

But one has to wonder, has life perhaps always been this disappointing? What might have changed over the past hundred years that has made it more so? Isn’t it more likely that, in looking back through the especially rosy-colored glasses that we like to employ to peer into our perfect American past, we are missing out on signs that satisfaction was not once as universal as we would like to believe?

There have always been loveless marriages. The history of the church could in a sense be viewed as one long history of corruption and self-serving violence. There have always been corrupt governments. Hell, the argument can be made that America was formed in order to protect the corrupt interests of rich men. Why should it be so surprising that it continues to do so?

I think there are two major differences today, though. One is that, as the strength of these aforementioned institutions wanes, people have become bolder in the face of their personal dilemmas. For instance, the power of the church to condemn someone for getting divorced, and the subsequent censure that would be imposed upon anyone who was dissatisfied enough to do so has waned a great deal, except perhaps in pockets around the country where Catholicism still rules. In general, people are less likely to put up with a shitty situation, and more likely to do something about it.

Another major difference between now and the ‘perfect’ past is that we talk about things more, so much more. Whereas once when a wife was unhappy with the fading affections of her husband, her only recourse was to grin and bear it, not wanting the shame of her own perceived disloyalty or ingratitude to come out. People of my parents and grandparents generation perhaps were thus more likely to stay in relationships long past their expiration date simply out of fear of the shame it would bring upon them if they were to say, ‘Enough. I’m out.’

So, isn’t it more likely that human nature hasn’t changed all the dramatically in the past century, but rather that our capacity for dealing with the near-universal disappointment these institutions bring to bear has grown? That our choices are immensely greater?

There are a couple of ways of looking at this that are immediately apparent. One is that we are simply so much more spoiled today than we ever have been--or for that matter, more than any society ever has been throughout history. It is no doubt true that we have more than ever in terms of material wants, choices in marriage, and freedom from church interference in our lives, and ability to choose our own paths free of government interference.

And with the vast bounty of material wealth out there -- which we are at least able to glimpse on tv and in the pages of glamour magazines -- perhaps it is not surprising that there might be an underlying sense of unfulfilled entitlement among the populace. We are constantly assailed with images of beautiful, shapely people doing glamorous things with beautiful accessories and in perfect clothing -- it’s no wonder half the country is insane with acquiring useless material goods that they can’t afford.

Also, the notion that everyone should be happy all the time is a cottage industry in this over-analyzed, over-therapized, over-medicated country. Between the drugs available ready to relieve you of feeling any lows – and for that matter, any real highs – along with the mainstreaming of talk therapy in the form of chat shows as well as the encouragement of one’s peers and co-workers to vomit out any and all bad feelings all the time, and row upon row of self-help books purporting to offer secrets to eternal, perpetual happiness, who can blame people for wondering why they’re not happy?

If you aren’t happy, it seems like you must not be trying hard enough.

But another way of approaching perpetual disappointment is to think about the supposedly endless upward track on which America has always been purported to travel. We are the ‘exceptional’ country, the one that would always hold a promise that each succeeding generation would outlive, out-earn and prosper more than the last. This is the rose-colored glasses view of disappointment, that itchy, pervading sense in the back of your skull that things could be so much better. That they WERE so much better before, or they could be better in the future, if only...It’s the curse of ‘the grass is always greener,’ only this grass existed in an imagined past or exists in an imagined future. We're standing on a patch of scrub desert, a barren vacant lot of our own perception, gazing at lush, green mirages on either side of our imagination.

This is a disappointment that stems from our sense that there actually can be a perfection that can be achieved, that there was a perfection once, and that we haven’t matched it. It is a delusional state in which we think on some level, perhaps deep in our subconscious that, if we aren’t perfectly content, we have somehow failed.

Why can we never be satisfied?

Of course, it’s also true that without human striving, without our ever-upward push toward Something Better, the hard-wired compulsion we have to expand and improve upon our lot, we’d still be living in the trees.

On the other hand, what’s so bad about trees?