Have you ever been alone in a crowded room when I'm here with you?

Have you ever been alone in a crowded room; well I'm here with you...

Jon Wong on the difference between being satisfied and being happy.

I was talking to Lucia yesterday about the move to Fort McMurray and mentioned that the place I was renting out came unfurnished. On the one hand, that's kind of a pain in the arse because it means I have to hunt for furniture when I get there. On the other hand, Lucia suggested that it'll feel more like home because it's my own furniture opposed to someone else's.

Now, let me just say that that isn't true for me. I said that the 2 years I spent in residence (the definitive example of using non-personal furniture) felt a lot more like home to me than the 2 years I spent off campus, where the furniture was all my own. And I said that this was likely because I've never been able to tie my happiness to things like furniture, even though I wish I could. In fact, I often wish that my happiness was tied to something I could control; something like furniture or baseball or something that isn't people. Because as we know, and as I've probably said countless times, people are fickle. As much as we like to say that we can "always count" on so and so, it's never entirely true, mainly because other people have their own lives to live while my furniture pretty much just sits there.

This got me thinking about the nature of happiness as it differs from the nature of satisfaction. And I think I have reached a conclusion. I think that happiness can never be separated from the things in life that are important to you while you can find satisfaction in pretty much anything as long as something good/some success has occurred in that particular department. So really, when Grant and I posted our notes on "'Gemutlichkeit' or Little things that make life... ok," what we were really doing was posting a list of things in life that bring us satisfaction.

The more I think about this, the clearer the distinction becomes. I realize, now, why I never considered myself to be "happy" when the Jays win, or when I have a good day at badminton, or when I've executed a particularly good lesson. But in those moments, I have felt satisfied; satisfied that I have experienced some form of goodness, success, or accomplishment - just not in an area of my life that I consider to be of egoistic importance. And all of this is not to downplay the importance of being satisfied. On the contrary, I think most of us would sacrifice a lot in order to be satisfied when the things that make us happy seem too distant, impossible, or volatile.

Sometimes, it seems like some cruel and ironic joke that it always seems a lot easier to be satisfied than happy. After all, if satisfaction is simply success in the areas of life that are less important to us, it doesn't seem fair that success is so much harder to obtain in the areas of life that are. At the same time, though, I think we have to understand that we measure "success" differently when we're striving for it in areas of our lives that we consider important. For example, badminton is not particularly important to me - in order to feel satisfied, I need only succeed to the degree of having a good day where I'm consistent and play well. However, if badminton was important - truly important - to me, I would need more than that to feel like I've "succeeded". I would need to train; compete; win titles and championships, etc...

At the end of the day, I think that we can learn to be ok with our lives if we were always satisfied - if we could always find success in the little things. I just think that you might have moments where you feel unfulfilled. People have trouble with this all the time. You take stock of your life and you think, "I'm actually having a pretty good life, from all objective measures. There's nothing really to complain about. So why, then, do I feel unfulfilled? Could it be that I'm just spoiled and ungrateful?" Well, you might be, of course. I can't say for sure. But maybe you're just not having success in some part of your life that you consider important or central to you. And I don't think that it's helpful to panic over whether or not this is an indication that everything you've done is meaningless, because that's usually not the case.

I think we are able to find satisfaction because we understand, on some level, that "everything means everything." And as Grant says, that's really not such a bad thing, you know? Don't reduce what you've done just because it's not something that you find important, because somebody, somewhere, would kill to find the kind of success you've found in the areas of your life that you merely find satisfying. To me, delivering a good lesson might merely be satisfying. To a student, who knows? Finding happiness isn't really about finding meaning in that sense. It's about recognizing that meaning can be found in practically everything; it's just that for some reason or another, some things mean more to us, personally, than others.

And that's really not such a bad thing either.