Satisfaction, happiness, and contentment are misunderstood. We believe these are desirable goals when, in fact, they are complex, nuanced, multifaceted and paradoxical.

It’s important to get down and dirty with these paradoxes because, otherwise, satisfaction can be a real killer.

Satisfaction is a bitch

That satisfied feeling, that we have arrived with nothing left to do, see, or be, kills our creativity, drive and ambition.

Creativity is borne from divine dissatisfaction. Creativity, Madam of rage, angst, squatter of nighttime, pokes her fiery talons into your belly, whispering archly and incessantly over the patter of conversation and normal day-to-day thought. Her tickles make you uncomfortable in your clothes, in your skin, in your life.

Her whispers slowly become screeches and then shrieks of outrage. Jumping in your skin, conflicted in spirit, confused, anguished; her outrage becomes your own.

Urgency strikes.

In the fierce grips of rampant narcissism and grandiose ambition powered by a relentless self-loathing, you throw mess, from inside out. You free the beast. You explode and expunge garbage. In the divine grasp of dissatisfaction, you make filthy art.

The divine not-knowing

All innovation begins by rejecting what is.

Dissatisfaction with the horse and cart led to the motorcar. Dissatisfaction with flat earth led to the discovery that the earth was round. The wheel was borne out of dissatisfaction with the inefficiency of brute labour. The weekend, childhood, computers, air flight – these began with a rejection of common knowledge and status quo.

To reject the mainstream, we must step outside to adopt the role of rebel. As pack animals, this is inherently difficult. Nothing is more excruciatingly lonely that doubting your sanity and distrusting your gut. Alone, you become your biggest enemy in your haste to reach a suitable conclusion in your quest for change and, satisfied, return to the warm bosom of your peers.

Premature satisfaction is a killer. Her siren call sings false praises. “You’ve done it” she exclaims. “It’s pretty good,” she soothes, stroking your cheek. Let’s get back inside, let’s take this conclusion, let’s reach for the sweet embrace of community.

Settling prematurely short-circuits your creativity. The divine not-knowing was too deep. You’ve swam out too far from the shore and you can’t see the murky bottom. Adrift, you’re busy painting pictures of godless demons, violent pirates, flesh-eating fish. You don’t know. You don’t know what you don’t know. The urgency of Madam Creativity has receded into the sheer terror of being adrift in not-knowing.

Drowning, you reach for anything – any one thing that you can hitch your weary soul to and return to shore. To plumb the depths of dissatisfaction is insanity. We are out, away, floundering wildly. There is no teacher, no map, no validation of true/false, real/unreal, good/bad, useful/useless. Perhaps you were always wrong. Perhaps you were under the false illusion of Madam Creativity. Perhaps she lied. Perhaps your Dad was right after all.

Is it any good?

Nobody knows self-loathing like the artist who has sniffed divine dissatisfaction. Alone, you must decide whether it’s good. Is this it? Is it done? Will it do? Does it need editing? Could you shine the diamond further? Would shining dilute the raw brilliance of it? Is it outrageous to imagine it is brilliant?

Is it useful? Is it relevant? Could I expose it to the harsh glare of others? Will I die a distended, horrible, humiliating death?

Think this is over-the-top? Perhaps you haven’t yet plumbed the depths.

Learning to swim

You know how to swim. Or you thought you did. And now you’ve kicked and splashed in terror. Now you’ve dove into the murky waters with no peripheries in sight. Meaning becomes free-floating. You’re utterly alone. It’s lonely.

You’re just treading water. There’s no progress. No idea when the edges will again become visible. No certainty of anything, except you treading water.

Until you learn to swim.

The funny thing about good ideas is that the more you have, the more you have. And these must be exposed to the public to be real. Without being freed from your head, they will rattle on forever, carving ever deeper dents inside your skull.

We’re not taught to lose sight of the shore. We’re taught to swim between the flags and to stay the course.

And so we settle on a superficial meaning of things too often, avoiding complexity to circumvent the pain of ambiguity. In so doing, we’re missing the riches of the depths. Nowhere more does this apply than to the paradox of satisfaction.