I'll Be Happy When...

What you're grasping for may not get you what you want.

Can’t Get No Satisfaction? The Buddha and Nietzsche Can Help

The key to contentment and happiness is accepting life as it is.

Published on November 3, 2011 by Toni Bernhard, J.D. in Turning Straw Into Gold

The latest celebrity Buddhist, Mick Jagger, can't get it. Neither, it appears, can I. It seems that to be satisfied, I'd have to arrange my life and the world to conform totally to my liking—and then have them stay that way:

I will cease being sick and immediately travel to the ocean to body surf;
My two grown children and their families will move in next door—one family on each side will do;
The daytime temperature outside will range from 70-80 degrees Fahrenheit—always;
Politicians on both side of the aisle will come to share my views;
I will never be cranky again.

You Can't Always Get What You Want

Notice that my satisfaction (which can also be thought of as my contentment or happiness) appears to be contingent on life conforming to my liking and my desires all the time. But it's not going to happen. I knew it before Mick Jagger sang it in another song: "You can't always get what you want." As the Buddhist monk, Ajahn Brahm, said: "You'd be asking the world for something it can never give you."

There is only one way to find personal satisfaction and happiness: we have to let go of our desire for life to always be how we want it to be.

The Buddha said, "I teach two things: the presence of dukkha in our lives and the path to the end of dukkha." Dukkha refers to the dissatisfaction we experience with the circumstances of our lives. In teaching "the presence of dukkha," the Buddha was instructing us to look deeply at this "can't get no satisfaction" that is so much a part of our daily experience. In teaching "the path to the end of dukkha," he was instructing us to investigate its cause so we can learn how to put an end to it.

To look deeply at this dissatisfaction, we have to turn our attention inward and watch what goes on in our minds. When I do this, I often find a low-grade unease, anxiety, and even dread. When I look for the cause of this low-grade dissatisfaction, I find that it stems from the world and my life not conforming to how I think they should be.

The Transience of Pleasant Experiences and the Inevitability of Unpleasant Experiences

If we try to control all of life's circumstances, we will be rife with dissatisfaction. This is because we can't make pleasant experiences last, and we can't prevent experiences that are unpleasant to us from arising. So, the cause of our dissatisfaction is this tendency to live in a constant state of craving, a state I like to call "want/don't want." We want pleasant experiences to last and we don't want unpleasant ones to arise.

As for pleasant experiences, that unease I referred to in my own mind is often present during a pleasant experience because I want it to last forever even though I know, deep down, that it can't (whether it be a good time with my granddaughter, a beautiful sunset, or an ice cream cone). As for unpleasant experiences, I can no more control the temperature outside than I can a politician's position on taxes—I can't even control the thoughts and emotions that arise in my mind (thus that crankiness I referred to!).

Life simply refuses to always be the way we want it to be or the way we think it should be. We can refuse to accept this, but it will only increase our dissatisfaction.

The good news is that we can ease this dissatisfaction by changing how we respond to pleasant and unpleasant experiences. When we open our hearts and minds to life as it is as opposed to how we want it to be, we can "get that satisfaction" we're seeking. It's a lifelong practice, but it's never too late to start.

Opening to life as it is doesn't mean we shouldn't take action to change things personally and globally. It simply means that our starting point is life as it is. We greet it without clinging to pleasant experiences since we know they won't last; and we greet it without exploding in anger in the face of unpleasant experiences since we know they are an inevitable part of being alive. I'm quite certain that you won't get through this day without encountering some unpleasant experience, whether it be your computer crashing, or having to deal with a person you don't like, or stubbing your toe.

The Buddha said we should "keep our cool" in the face of unpleasant experiences (he called it "cooling the fire of desire"). Then we can respond skillfully instead of angrily. Anger just adds more stress to an already tough situation. Personal satisfaction and happiness are not dependent on what experiences we have but on how we respond to them.

Nietzsche's Amor Fati

It takes courage to accept life as it is. Frederick Nietzsche called this amor fati or "loving our fate." When I'm able to see my own dissatisfaction and the constant craving that is its cause, my heart and mind open to embracing my life as it is, including the transience of pleasant experiences and the inevitability of unpleasant ones. And sometimes this openness gives rise to amor fati—loving my fate—which is nothing more than loving this very life.

The Thai Buddhist monk, Ajahn Chah, called this state of openness to life, "the happiness of the Buddha." This means that contentment and happiness are within reach of all of us. In other words, we all have the ability to reverse the theme of that Stones song and "get satisfaction"!

I'm the author of the How to Be Sick: A Buddhist-Inspired Guide for the Chronically Ill and their Caregivers, winner of the 2011 Gold Nautilus Book Award in Self-Help/Psychology. Website: www.howtobesick.com

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from http://psychologytoday.com