Satisfaction × What You Have • It's All In How You See It (HYC001)
⁘ Created: 2026-02-19 ⁘ Updated: 2026-02-19
When your basic physical and emotional needs are covered... Still not feeling happy — not satisfied? It doesn't seem enough! Let's chase for something better and more. Forever and ever. So you're chasing your ideas. Not your real needs.
If life brings you abundance. How excellent. Don't attach to it. Openings for more? Go for it. Not at the cost of others. Sleeping on the floor — eating plain porridge? That's fine too. Experience of "not having" is also a need fulfilled.
Have you considered, how thin the connection is between what you have, what is, and how happy and satisfied you feel? No? Well, let's take a moment to reflect.
Typically, it has much more to do with our perceptions and our ideas than what actually is the real state of affairs. When you're chasing ideas, their attainment, a condition for your satisfaction, it's an ever-moving goalpost. You are in a tunnel. A never ending tunnel at that, with only a dead end in the end, when you realize this wasn't it. Then you chase for another thing.
Let's revisit the basics. Wants versus needs. Your physical body. What you need is shelter from the elements and wildlife, a place to lay your head upon, a diet with well-rounded nutritions to upkeep your body. If there's a balanced spectrum of flavors, salty, sweet, sour, bitter, pungent, astringent — then that's a bonus. It's good for you as well, but it's not a strict day to day need.
Much less is it a true need to camp in a luxurious mansion, sleeping on the seven softest mattresses, gulping down your dishes of choice from the world cuisine, prepared by eminent chefs. But when that idea has been fixed in our heads — this is what we want, this is what we deserve — we will not be satisfied with a common meal and a mattress on the ground.
Speak not of our emotional needs, where our basic needs are basically feeling safe and at peace, being cared for, belonging to a group or a community. Again, our happiness and satisfaction is corroded by our ideas. We wish to be loved in a particular way, even adored, and if we don't get that, then we are sad.
And a feeling of peace and safety will not be there until our potential enemies have been preemptively eliminated. We are consumed by our worries over ideas. So there you have your own ideas, your own perceptions of what you should have in order to be at ease, at peace, satisfied.
Beyond that, we absorb narratives from the world, from others. You should have this, you should have that, otherwise it's not good enough. And even while that might actually just be well enough for us, we jump on the wagon placed before us by others. We are chasing an image in their eyes.
We are not satisfied with a belly full, sharing a meal with a friend. We must be seen as the belly-full person with abundance, who gives to others. Even when we give to others, if nobody noticed, if it wasn't recognized, we remain dissatisfied by our actions. Because we are constructing and curating identities instead of dealing with the real needs of life. And that, my friend, is obviously a black hole with a mouth wider than the universe.
By all means, allow for more, welcome more when the world provides it. And when the openings are there, even pursue it. But do not in that infringe on the rights and needs of others. And do not ever make the attainment of even more, when you already have enough, a condition for your happiness and satisfaction.
Also, do not imagine that discomfort and lack are entirely absent from the cycle of life. You need to experience abundance, you need to experience lack. Only then will you appreciate what you have, feel a sense of gratitude. Even as you fall short, be grateful for that. Be at peace, be satisfied. That too is a need that is being fulfilled. When your ideas of satisfied, sufficient to the spec, become your directors, you become a slave to your urges and your ideas.
For a certain mystic, it was enough to sleep on a thatched mattress on the floor of a cave. Compose poems, munching on nettle leaves, watching his body turn green, and be happy — that was okay. Mila found satisfaction and fulfilment in the simple essences of life.
As for us mere mortals living on the planes of complexity, let us start our journey to satisfaction and contentment by being present for what is. Raw experience, raw perception. See where that takes you. What remains. Setting aside our distorted and entitled ideas of what should be, what must be, we can be happy campers, wherever we may land. Do not pursue satisfaction in the tree tops. It will be there when you stop chasing it.