…and the inherent difficulties surrounding it. In my experience, discontent arises out of dissatisfaction. The greater (and more pernicious) the discontent, the deeper the dissatisfaction. And the deepest dissatisfaction is the most difficult to recognize and address: a dissatisfaction with who and what we are as an individual.
I wonder at times if the more fortunate among us aren’t the incurious. Too often we either mask discontent with displacement activity: games, sex, movies, drugs, travel, objects…essentially anything that entertains. Or we address (what we think is) a proximal cause: a boss, a wife, a disappointment. The incurious never look further, some content, some perpetually angry, some living perhaps Thoreau’s “lives of quiet desperation.” But for an unfortunate few — the curious, the introspective, the self-actualized — discontent is too great to bear. It becomes a lure into the unconscious, and they have no choice but pursuit.
I count myself among the latter, and I have mixed feelings as to whether I am among the more or the less fortunate. On the one hand I enjoy a psychic peace born of contentment. On the other, being “different” engenders a shameful self-satisfaction born of ego. It also engenders loneliness born of the inability to sustain incurious company.
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I remember working for a surveying company 50 years ago and a rough-hewn, blue-collar, red-neck Caterpillar operator at the job site declared, “If I didn’t have to work all I would do is eat, sleep and fuck.” He made this assertion with world-weary resignation oozing from every pore of his slouching figure. He was ground down and demoralized by the crushing banality of his bleak minimalist existence. I have yet to encounter a more debased specimen of mankind.