Back in September 2021, I bought a new cardigan in a lovely colour. Unreasonably proud of myself for choosing something not black, and riding the dopamine high of my first new item of clothing after a 15-month shopping fast, I said to myself, laughably, “This is it: I’ve found the perfect cardigan and won’t need to buy another one again!”
Of course, as anyone who has ever bought anything will know—that feeling lasted only a short while. I was able to stretch my sense of satisfaction for a longer period, maybe, with a general commitment to buying less and these self-imposed parameters. But, pretty soon, a shiny new thing—in this case, sumptuous new knitwear, organic, from Spain!—came into view, and what I already had in my closet was no longer enough.
Part of this comes from living in a consumerist society that holds accumulation (of things, of money, of power and prestige) up as the ultimate goal in life. It probably also comes from the fact that North Americans are exposed to anywhere between 4,000–10,000 advertisements each day. But this Atlantic article gives an interesting biological/evolutionary explanation for why we can never stay satisfied with anything, much less our wardrobes.
The article’s author, Arthur C. Brooks, says our bodies are subject to built-in mechanisms of homeostasis, which works to maintain stability and balance in our physical systems, but also extends to our emotional lives:
“Homeostasis keeps us alive and healthy. But it also explains why drugs and alcohol work as they do, as opposed to how we wish they would. While that first dose of a new recreational substance might give you great pleasure, your previously naive brain quickly learns to sense an assault on its equilibrium and fights back by neutralizing the effect of the entering drug, making it impossible to get the first feeling back.
[…]
“The same set of principles works on our emotions. When you get an emotional shock—good or bad—your brain wants to re-equilibrate, making it hard to stay on the high or low for very long. This is especially true when it comes to positive emotions, for primordial reasons that we’ll get into shortly. It’s why, when you achieve conventional, acquisitive success, you can never get enough. If you base your sense of self-worth on success—money, power, prestige—you will run from victory to victory, initially to keep feeling good, and then to avoid feeling awful.
In other words, our brains may never let us feel satisfied.
I’ve been thinking about this in terms of my writing career lately. For so many years, the goal was to write a book and get it published—and by some combination of minor talent, major luck and sheer doggedness—it happened for me. I have a book out there. Many people like it. And, for at least four-and-a-half more months, I get to be a full-time author. I feel incredibly selfish and totally ungrateful to even hint that this is not enough.
And yet it doesn’t feel like enough. I still want more. UGH. Am I doomed?
Luckily, Brooks gives some practical advice for how to beat the dissatisfaction curse:
All of our evolutionary and biological imperatives focus us on increasing the numerator—our haves. But the more significant action is in the denominator—our wants.
[…]
The secret to satisfaction is not to increase our haves—that will never work (or at least, it will never last). That is the treadmill formula, not the satisfaction formula. The secret is to manage our wants. By managing what we want instead of what we have, we give ourselves a chance to lead more satisfied lives.
He writes at length about different strategies for managing and recalibrating your wants, but for my purposes, I’m only going to focus on one of them: getting smaller.
Getting small can mean having less (like Marie Kondo-ing the closet), but it can also mean focusing our attention on smaller moments, rather than letting our minds run through the entire sweep of time, dwelling on the past and scheming for the future.
What it means for my writing life is that I need to pay attention only to the task at hand, like writing a sentence or making a drawing, and not think about stuff like whether I’ll manage to complete a manuscript, or whether it will sell, or whether I’ll suffer the second-book slump, or whether writing books can ever truly be my career. Thinking big will only drive me crazy and leave me dissatisfied with what I already have. Getting small means letting go and finding satisfaction in what’s happening right now.
Here’s the funny thing: I feel pretty satisfied at this moment, writing this newsletter—not because I’m particularly proud of my writing here, but because it is a small, mostly meaningless thing. When I first started Closet Dispatch, I had hoped it would “take off” and boost my career in some way, but it didn’t, and I’m honestly glad it hasn’t. It has given me the space and freedom to write whatever I feel like without any pressure. And it has reminded me that simply getting a few words down and drawing a little picture to go with them can be enough.
:) Teresa
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"What it means for my writing life is that I need to pay attention only to the task at hand, like writing a sentence or making a drawing"--yes! Reminding myself of this over and over again forever.
I just got that issue of the Atlantic in the mail yesterday, and am definitely interested in reading that article and the others. (And as an aside, it was one of the approximately two issues each year that don't make me want to crawl into a hole upon seeing the cover, lol.)