Discontentment and the choices

How often do we have an eerie feeling that things are not right in our lives? Life is not flowing in a way we have imagined. We even speculate that if and only if the current situations change, we WILL become more happy in future?

Imagination of a life is often driven by our lived experiences and observing others. The story of life in our head and in everyday situations also often does not match and we keep striving to match it. This mismatch leads to the feeling of discontentment.

The perception of mismatch or the gap between imagined life and reality shapes the intensity of discontentment. The problem here is that this gap is an imagined gap and solely depends on the person who is perceiving it. And that leads to another fact that discontentment is a very personal experience.

Is discontentment a bad feeling? Why do we want the feeling of discontentment to go away?

The nature of discontentment is like that of a mite. You can't stay with it for long. Either it will push you to do something or it will erode you. And that's why most of us try to fix this feeling. However, most of the time, the inertia of moving from one state of being to another state gets the better of us.

As we feel the discomfort, we are faced with two immediate fallacies, which trap us. Either we think we have no choice or we imagine too many possibilities, most of which are often unrealistic and eventually draining. In both the cases we stay stuck at the same place as both are at the extreme ends. Amidst the feeling of discontentment either we are running on the treadmill of life, which doesn't have a stop button or we are on the couch not able to pick ourselves up to do anything.

And we often keep loathing ourselves about being stuck with discontentment, leading to feelings of anger, hate, guilt or shame, which makes the vicious cycle worse.

Instead of going to both extremes, both of which come out of our efforts of mindlessly running away from discontentment, can we accept it peacefully, befriend it, and ask deeply what it wants? Where is it pointing us to?

If we can dare to look deeply, the choices the discontentment present are binary in nature and are simple to navigate.

First Choice (1A): To stay with it. Unacknowledged.

Consequence: Slowly but surely the feeling will erode your zest towards life. And the erosion might feel like walking from apathy towards despair. Life will feel heavy. In this case, we have not acknowledged the discontent and we often say, “I am good”. But often we are lying to ourselves.

The good bad news and bad news:

Bad news: most of us are lying to ourselves. We are so invested in a perfect life that we are ashamed to admit that we are not satisfied with it. We want to keep a brave smiling face as a facade. Like an emoji on a chat. We are sure we have figured it all out and now is the time to be happy. But happiness eludes us still.

Good news: This is not personal. First, don't blame yourself. The mind has its own vices and virtues, and we are briefly trapped in an evolutionary continuum (More on this on the next blog). But as evolution is natural, even at an individual level, we are bound to move out of this brief trap, towards the second choice. It’s only a matter of time.

Second Choice (1B): Not to stay with it. Acknowledge, perplexed.

If you choose to do something when you are not satisfied with life, discontentment can drive you towards two primary choices (We say 2A and 2B).

Did I say TWO choices? You can argue that there are many choices, and they depend on which aspect of life is associated with the discontent.. Life has many facets or compartments: professional life, personal life, personal relationships, professional relationships, personal finance, family finance, company finance, personal health, family health, community health, global health…the list is long.

After making a decision to do something about the discontentment, we normally make the Mistake of thinking that there are many choices to pick from but essentially it's still binary. Some of us are not even aware of these primary choices. But we have them.

The normal modus operandi is to look at others and compare the projection of their lives with ours. Day-to-day interactions and social media become sources of constant comparison. Because this is what we are wired to do. There is no resistance to the neural pathway to mirror others. That's one of the primary ways of learning, embedded in our evolution and also our childhoods. Learning by seeing and doing the same.

Since prehistoric times, our survival as a species has depended on our awareness of the environment around us. We have been historically fighting the threat of a predator. We had to fight or run. WE learned from how others in our own group survived. We did what they did in order to feel safe. All this is hard wired in our brain. So obviously, if you're not feeling secure or happy you will try to look out for other human beings who have supposedly done it.

Now that you have decided to do something about the discontentment you look for imitating someone by default. We look for people who at least seem content and happy. Mimicking and following are a few shortcut ways by which our brain has learnt new functions and hence evolved.

Should we drift to these default brain settings? Settings that evolved thousands of years ago?

But, we are not living in much simpler, prehistoric times. Things got complicated as human civilization evolved. The outer environment is changing with a rapid speed and our brain is still catching up. Also, we know that this is not personal and we are in the evolutionary process. We are work in progress.

So what should we do? Do we wait for the brain to catch up? And until then, work with an old operating system.

These reflections land us to another moment of decision.

Choice (2A): Look outward and fix/create/evolve the environment

This choice is our default setting. A checkbox already checked. It's easy to look outside. WE have all the sensory organs helping us and feed us with the information. We gather information to make sense of the world from the day we are born. This is our default way of working. But the catch here is that our perceptions shape our reality and these perceptions are shaped by our own experience of life. Perceptions are an inherent total sum of thoughts and feelings.

That means, what we see is our own perception of reality and not the actual reality. What if, our own innate feelings and thoughts always color the outer reality?

Then, this choice might lead us to all the places we might never want to go, and guide us briefly to temporary solace or pleasure. However, this choice might never make us aware of our own tinted glasses, through which we see the world. Any reference point we pick might not be the reference point we want to start from towards a contentment seeking journey, because we don't really know for sure if the point we are looking at is real or just a projection of our own beliefs and limitations.

Clearly, it’s not a good choice to start with if we have our tinted glasses on or at least have become aware of the tint.

Choice (2B): Look inside and fix/create/evolve ourselves.

This is not a default choice. It’s almost against the neural pathways of our brain. How on earth do we look inside? All the sensory organs are evolved to sense the outside world. That's the way we gather data and process. And that's why when we are asked to look inside it's hard to do so. It doesn't come naturally to us.

We can’t look inside. We sense our ‘inside’ space.

When people essentially talk about looking inside they are talking about inner sensations: being aware of the sensations, enquiring about why they are there, accepting them, and making sense of them, and deciding our actions based on this knowledge.

These sensations are thoughts and feelings.

So looking inside is basically “To sense your feelings/emotions and thoughts.” and then develop ‘insights’. This knowledge helps us to become aware of the tint through which we see the world.

We will talk more about the importance of this “inside looking” in the coming blogs and how this looking will change the reality.

I will leave you with a few questions:

Are ‘thought’ things?

What about feelings/emotions?

Are they ‘matter’ (as in physics)?