Never Satisfied. Always Moving
Why we’re never satisfied, and why it’s a strength of the human species
How many people ever feel truly satisfied in life for more than, say, the length of a vacation? It’s rare, and you’d think it wouldn’t be. We have everything our ancestors could have dreamed of for material comforts, and we still feel unsatisfied. Sounds depressing, but what if there is a good reason for this and it’s actually good for us? What if the need to keep moving and striving is a core part of the human condition, and maybe even one of the primary reasons we became the dominant species on the planet?
Dopamine
We are seekers of more, and our brains evolved to feel rewarded at getting things that make us feel good. Dopamine is a neurotransmitter that connects what we experience in the physical world with things we enjoy emotionally and is designed to essentially make us learn and associate certain things in the world with feeling rewarded. When a cave man finds a sweet tasting berry and eats it, dopamine is released and it tells the brain through that good feeling to remember things like what the berry looked like, where it was found, how it smelt, etc. When something makes you feel rewarded, dopamine gets released and you begin to associate rewards with that behavior. The neural pathways grow stronger each time and you more and more associate certain behaviors with feeling rewarded.
But that feeling of reward goes away and you begin to crave that release once more. You look for more of that sweet tasting berry and begin to try living near those sweet tasting berries as much as possible. This isn’t a bad thing most of the time. Cave men absolutely should be seeking out calorie rich foods because for them it’s a survival strategy. For us today it’s good a lot of the time too. Spending time with good friends feels rewarding so we try to spend lots of time with good friends. Again, this isn’t a bad thing.
The problem comes with addictive behaviors that are destructive. Drugs can make you feel amazing temporarily and then you become addicted to the heightened levels of dopamine when you do them so you become addicted as you seek them out more and more. Generally the way to change these behaviors is to try and replace the bad behavior with a good (or at least neutral) behavior that will also feel rewarding.
Ok, so we are always seeking to maximize our rewards and dopamine is a neurotransmitter that is designed to adapt our behavior towards seeking maximum rewards. Interestingly, there is another source of reward we don’t often think about: satisfying curiosity and seeking knowledge.
“Together, these studies suggest that the expression thirst for knowledge really is more than metaphorical. The acquisition of information follows the same basic behavioral pathways as reward-based learning and even has a literal reward value in the brain. We can add information to the list with food and water when it comes to survival. Old brain (find food, avoid danger) pairs up with new brain (get information to plan and predict the future) to help us thrive today.”
Brewer, Judson. Unwinding Anxiety
It seems natural selection made us this way–a species that can never be satisfied as the feeling of being rewarded is only temporary. It isn’t a symptom of the modern world that makes us like this because it’s been with us since the beginning. We evolved to never feel satisfied. Seems strange and almost cruel, but then again it’s adaptive for something. Those who could feel no everlasting satisfaction, who would continue to find new horizons to strive for, are the ones natural selection chose to propagate the human species. Luckily for us, knowledge seeking also feels rewarding and can’t be truly satisfied.
That need for knowledge and curiosity leads us to be addicted to profoundly positive behaviors: learning, inventing, experimenting, exploring. These are foundational to the rise of human beings as the dominant species on the planet.
We Have To Keep Moving
Physically we need to keep moving and doing too. Of course we all know this. This is why we know exercise is so important. When we lounge around all day our muscles atrophy, we get fat, and we fall into physical decline. So it’s built into our physiology.
Interestingly though it isn’t built into every animal. Other primate species don’t need to exercise like we do in order to stay fit despite being so genetically similar. We sometimes hear people talk about how we should look to other primate species for clues as to how humans should live, but the fact is we aren’t bonobos or chimpanzees.
“Yet chimpanzees and other apes remain remarkably healthy at their habitually low levels of physical activity. Even in captivity, diabetes is rare, and blood pressures do not increase with age. Despite having naturally high cholesterol levels, chimpanzee arteries do not harden and clog. As a result, chimps do not develop humanlike heart disease or have heart attacks from occluded coronary arteries. And they stay lean. In 2016 I worked with Steve Ross at Lincoln Park Zoo in Chicago and a team of collaborators to measure metabolic rates and body composition in zoo-living apes across the U.S. The results were eye-opening: even in captivity, gorillas and orangutans average only 14 to 23 percent body fat and chimpanzees less than 10 percent, on par with Olympic athletes.
Among our primate cousins, we humans are clearly the odd ape out. Somehow humans evolved to require much higher levels of physical activity for our bodies to function normally. Sitting for hours on end, grooming and napping (or watching the tube) have gone from standard practice to a health risk.”
Herman Pontzer, Humans Evolved to Exercise
Pontzer goes on to describe the reason why we diverged and began to need to exercise was due to two developments: upright walking allowed us to cover more ground using fewer calories and this extended our reach into new habitats, and the development of hunting increased our activity levels. “Our physiology has adapted to this physically active way of life, such that we must exercise to be healthy.”
Here we can see an interesting link with what I mentioned earlier about dopamine: seeking knowledge. We evolved physically to be better at traveling long distances–exploring, and we are rewarded for this with better bodies happier minds.
This need to keep moving and doing and striving is core to who we are as human beings. This need is in our body and spirit. The happiest person is the person who uses their self to the full potential–who keeps moving and striving for the best they can be regardless of their start or luck in life.
It might be unsatisfying to know that eternal bliss and felicity aren’t in the cards for us and that there is no achievement you can make that will make you forever feel “finally, I’m happy and can rest now,” but that impossibility is what drove us to build the great works of civilization that we’ve done, and to be unsatisfied with how good even those have been for us.
No Paradise
"Well, that's the second time man's been thrown out of Paradise."
"No, no, Bones, this time we walked out on our own. Maybe we weren't meant for paradise. Maybe we were meant to fight our way through, struggle, claw our way up, scratch for every inch of the way. Maybe we can't stroll to the music of the lute. We must march to the sound of drums."
Bones and Kirk on TOS: This Side of Paradise
Even Nietzsche’s concept that life must be aesthetically justified or we’ll feel it is meaningless–that “we have our highest dignity in our significance as works of art – for it is only as an aesthetic phenomenon that existence and the world are eternally justified”–hints at this. Feeling awe and wonder in the world is healthy for us. It improves our mood, helps cure depression, and refocuses us towards meaningful goals. Hallucinogenic drugs are often used as a way to induce this feeling of wonder and connection to the universe on demand. Yet we live in a society filled with wonders that people of earlier eras would be astounded by. Even the most powerful Roman emperors would have been astounded by a plane or a skyscraper, but because those are every day to us we can’t feel awe. We must strive for ever greater works of awe or we feel life, if Nietzsche is correct, is meaningless.
The point is we can’t seem to live in paradise. Today I am easily fed on 3 healthy meals every day with hot and cold running water on demand, lights that flick on and off with the tap of a button, and I have access to the collective knowledge of humanity through multiple magical technological boxes. To humanity in 99% of its history this would be a paradise, and yet no one today would say that. We’re never satisfied. We’re not meant for paradise, but we are meant to strive to build it even if we’ll never live it.
Odysseus rejected the lotus-eaters and Circe in the Odyssey. He was right to do so.
We’re Happiest Striving
So if nothing can ever truly satisfy us in the long term then what are we to do? The answer is “we have to keep moving.” Whether it’s moving for our physical health, or moving towards a goal, we are at our best not when we’ve gained or reached a certain state, but when we’re striving towards something.
Dr. Adam Fraser, a researcher into human performance, studied when we’re actually happy and at our best and found it’s not when we’ve achieved. It’s when we’re striving for something. He defines striving as, "taking on challenging activities that require us to be brave and evolve in the pursuit of something that is purposeful and important."
“my team’s research showed that people felt most alive and stimulated in the striving period leading up to the goal. Completing the goal did produce a period of elation, but this was followed by a flat spot of indifference, disappointment and often sadness, during which people are grieving that they are no longer in the striving phase. The completion of the goal has taken the striving away and an emptiness ensues.”
…
“To summarise our findings, what this project taught us was that those who had what most people would consider the optimal life (low on challenge and struggle) lacked wellbeing, zest and passion. In contrast those who moved away from that seemingly low struggle environment into one that involved challenge, discomfort and uncertainty, became more alive and fulfilled. What is good for us sounds counterintuitive.”
Adam Fraser, Strive
Why this would be seems to come, again, from how our brains evolved. We are a species that evolved to seek, to keep moving. Whether it’s in our body or our mind, we have to strive to be healthy. Just as your body will decline without moving, your mind and spirit will decline without striving.
“Goldhill writes about the neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp who suggests that of the seven core instincts in the human brain (anger, fear, panic-grief, maternal care, pleasure/ lust, play, and seeking), seeking (or what I call striving) is the most vital. All of us have this desire to seek, fed by the neurotransmitter dopamine. When we seek, we are rewarded by our brain being flooded with dopamine which, in turn, makes us feel pleasure. As Goldhill notes, The human desire to seek explains why achieving major goals, or even winning the lottery, doesn’t cause long-term changes in happiness. But our drive to look ahead needn’t cause a permanent state of dissatisfaction, as seeking is itself a fulfilling activity. In other words, the goal is not the goal. The striving towards the goal is the goal.”
Adam Fraser, Strive
Another example of how we need to to keep moving and striving comes from studies of the elderly. Continuing to work later in life is a health benefit and can delay the onset of the most destructive parts of aging.
“A 2016 study of about 3,000 people, published in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health, suggested that working even one more year beyond retirement age was associated with a 9% to 11% lower risk of dying during the 18-year study period, regardless of health.”
Working Later in Life Can Pay Off in More Than Just Income, Harvard Health Publishing
Trade-offs
All of this said there are still the downsides of our being this way. This is a trait that benefits the species and community at the expense of the feelings of the individual. The species and community grows and thrives, and the individual may even be better off because of their striving, but their feelings may be satisfied only temporarily.
Another downside is greed. Nothing is ever enough and the drive to continue gaining can become destructive to yourself and others. So if we are happiest when we are striving towards something, then we need to be mindful of what precisely we’re striving towards to ensure we aren’t falling into greed.
Similar to greed is the inability to see the benefits of what you already have. Perhaps people wouldn’t cheat on their spouses so much, or keep swiping on dating apps for eternity if they could just see that no, in this particular case they should be happy with what they have.
Strong in Will
The point is you have to be conscious about your feelings and think logically about whether you should strive for something more in a particular domain, or if you should direct your energies elsewhere. This is another human capacity that separates us from other animals. It isn’t just our need to keep striving, moving, and seeking more, it’s our ability to think consciously and rationally about what we’re seeking and redirect those energies towards what we decide on consciously.
It is a limitation and tension in us that we still desire all those things that keep us from moving and striving. We still desire too much relaxation, too much sugary foods, too much comfort even though it’s bad for us. We then have to use that rational part of the brain to say no to ourselves for our greater good. We can’t yield to what we feel like we want all the time.
None of this might sound palatable. A lot of us would prefer to live a life with a passive income on a permanent early retirement, or a Walden life out in the wilderness away from the cares of civilization. But This inability to be healthy mentally, physically, or spiritually through sitting still is our great strength as a species. This is a driving force that made us become more than just another animal species. Innovation of all forms technologically, philosophically, artistically, and socially come from our inability to be satisfied with what we have. We could lament that we can’t be happy just lazing around, or we could embrace what is inherent in our nature.
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
Tennyson, Ulysses