It’s common to hear friends, colleagues, or siblings moan about unfulfilled dreams.
I have this colleague who hates his job. He complains he’s not being paid enough for the work he does and dreams of finding a better paying job. I’ve helped him refine his resume twice, but he’s only made 2 job applications in the last 6 months. It’s been almost two years and he’s still moaning about the same things.
It’s clear this colleague doesn’t really want a better paying job. His actions show that he wants the stability of his current job more than he’s willing to put in the work to interview.
Trough of discontent
Strong unfulfilled desires often lead to long periods of discontentment. This is when you’re not satisfied about where you’re at, and yet you also don’t take massive action to fulfil your desire.
This scenario is so prevalent that I call it the “trough of discontent”.
Arguably, some people spend most of their lives living in this trough.
In this scenario, discontent is interspersed with happiness. When you achieve your goal or give up on it, your mood flips from discontented to happy.
Happiness comes when you don’t have unfulfilled desires. This is the state where nothing is missing, nothing is broken. But happiness is often fleeting. You might celebrate for a short moment, and then soon enough you’d have a new desire that can’t be fulfilled, forming a new trough of discontent.
As we’re desiring machines, we often live with unfulfilled desires which bring us discontentment.
The stronger our desire, or the more desires that we have, the more we’d be discontented.
As Naval succinctly puts it:
Desire’s a contract you make to be unhappy until you get what you want. You become disturbed because you want something. Then you work really hard to get it and are miserable in the meantime. Finally, when you get it, you revert to the state you were in before you had it.
Flipping the script
How do we flip the script - instead of living most of our lives in the trough of discontent, how do we live a life with periods of prolonged satisfaction?
Tradeoffs
The key to prolonged satisfaction lies in tradeoffs.
There are always tradeoffs when we have unfulfilled desires. If there weren’t any tradeoffs, you probably would already have fulfilled your desire.
Want a higher paying job? You’d have to sacrifice nights and weekends, put in the work to find jobs and prepare for interviews.
What your dream guy or girl? You’d have to put yourself out there and risk getting embarrassed or rejected.
There are two main ways to deal with tradeoffs to live in prolonged satisfaction.
Fully commit to desire
The first way is to deal with tradeoffs is to commit your full focus to fulfil your desire.
When you fully commit, you’d work with a sense of purpose. There’s a certain sense of pleasure in knowing that you’re progressing in your journey. Incidentally, I believe this is how we find our purpose.
As an example, say I have a strong desire to work for myself and not work for a company. Full focus means quitting my job and fully focusing on building my own company. I’d have to dedicate most of my day to building, writing, marketing, and customer support.
I’ll start from zero and be an amateur in most of these skills. But as I put in the work, my skills improve. With better skills, I’ll then start building something people desire which then leads to higher sales. Walking this journey is both satisfying and purposeful.
But not everyone can commit to this path as full commitment comes with tradeoffs. Some tradeoffs include the fear of not having enough money, the lost of work-identity, and the disapproval from family and friends.
If I can’t accept the tradeoffs (meaning if I have this desire for years but still continue working corporate), I’d be living in the trough of discontent.
Relinquish desire
Herein comes the second way to deal with tradeoffs. Which is to fully relinquish my desire if I can’t accept the tradeoff.
Once I relinquish my desire, I’d revert to the state where nothing is missing and this is where I’ll again be content.
The secret to giving up on desires is to ask ourselves if we’re willing to fully accept both the good and bad. In my example above, I have to accept that I’d have more doubts and worries about money when starting my own company. This is one price I have to pay to live out my dream of running a company.
If I can’t accept this tradeoff, it simply means I don’t want it enough.
So the key is taking the good and bad as a whole. I can’t simply cherry pick just the good parts and leave out the bad.
Let’s summarise in pictures
Desires have tradeoffs.
If you really want something, your desire exceeds the tradeoffs. In this case, you should fully commit to fulfil your desire regardless of the tradeoffs. Doing so brings purpose and contentment.
If you can’t accept the tradeoffs, you simply don’t want it enough. Move on to your next desire that you’d hopefully want more.
So to be discontented, simply do the opposite. Don’t commit to things you really want. Instead, hold on to weak desires for years dreaming of the day you’d get over your fears.