The Satisfaction Trap
Humans are rarely satisfied with what they have.
Not only humans, every other organism that has seen the face of earth never reaches ultimate satisfaction. Millions of years of evolution has built us in a way that encourages us to be stressed and agile and not satisfied and stuck. It lures us toward a make believe stage of life that promises contentment, only to find that it is not to meant to be experienced forever. As soon as you conquer one challenge, the other comes running at you.
When do you stop running?
Well, there’s only so much you can do. Your satisfaction level is the proportion of the desire pool that’s met. Desires are proportional to, among other factors, your capacity or, in other words, energy. Desires evolve with the body energy. When you are young, physical energy overpowers the mental energy. As you grow older, the physical energy starts depleting, opening up doors for mental energy to bloom. Accumulation of the mental energy is wisdom. The transition of energies guide type and pool size of our desires. Old age leads marks the onset of physical and mental energy depletion, leading to what some call contentment or satisfaction. You stop running and start settling.
Why did you stop running?
Not necessarily because you achieved Nirvana but because your energy pool depleted. Aging is the body’s signal to stop wanting more. Nature cannot allow its organisms to keep wanting more; this would lead to an imbalance that eventually will lead to nature’s own demise. An ecosystem’s survival is based on carefully optimising the resources at hand — balancing the supply with demand and vice versa.
How does nature reduce demand?
The answer is aging. Imagine you never aged, never died. What would happen to the resources that you consume? Will they be always be present to quench your unlimited desires? This is a zero sum game — a limit to supply. You age because you have demanded more than the nature can provide. On of the direct effects of wanting more is stress, which causes aging.
