When Being Dissatisfied with Our Lives is Good For Us and Humanity

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Both psychologists and the general public tend to conceptualize flourishing in terms of current psychological states and self-evaluations. For instance, when researchers measure psychological wellbeing, they typically employ questionnaires asking individuals to report their present life satisfaction. The underlying assumption is straightforward: people reporting positive psychological states are flourishing, while those reporting negative states are not. This makes sense. As I've noted in previous newsletters, individuals who feel positive about their lives generally demonstrate better mental health, greater optimism, heightened inspiration, increased productivity, and stronger prosocial tendencies. However, it is also important to recognize that we can't always be satisfied with our lives. And this is a good thing. Constructive dissatisfaction can serve as the psychological catalyst that drives not only our personal growth but also the advancement of human civilization more broadly.

Our emotions and self-evaluations often function as important information for self-regulation. Even negative emotions and life evaluations serve critical functions. Because humans possess agency—our capacity to make choices and shape our own lives—these negative states provide valuable feedback that helps us change course when needed. When we are selecting goals and making decisions, current dissatisfactions can help us plot our path toward a better life. Consider, for example, how feeling dissatisfied with your physical health might motivate you to adopt new dietary habits or begin an exercise regimen. 

What is key is that we seek to understand whether our current dissatisfaction reflects useful information about a need for change in our life circumstances, or if it indicates a need for change in our attitude or outlook. Sometimes, our current situation is actually quite favorable but we don't do a good job of appreciating what we have. Or we fail to take a hard look in the mirror at ways in which our own mindset and behavior are the reasons our current situation feels unsatisfactory. This becomes particularly difficult when we regularly consume media or participate in social environments that foster rumination, encourage a sense of victimhood, amplify outrage, or facilitate unhealthy social comparisons.

However, in some cases, our negative psychological states are accurate signals that aspects of our lives are not good or could be better if we changed not our attitude but our situation. For example, if your current job is making you miserable despite the fact that you approach it with a positive attitude and give it your all, your negative feelings can help motivate a constructive life change. This might mean looking for a different employer or taking an entirely different career path that better fits your personality and potential. Improving your future flourishing may even involve intentionally making choices and pursuing strategic goals that lead to greater stress and hardship in the short term in service of longer-term fulfillment.

On a broader scale, the fact that humans are never fully satisfied has been crucial for human progress throughout history. Our perpetual striving for improvement has driven exploration, experimentation, and innovation. That nagging sense that things could be better propels us toward advancements in science, medicine, technology, law, and culture. If previous generations had found complete contentment in their circumstances, would we now benefit from the medical advances that alleviate suffering and lengthen our lives, the technological innovations that facilitate travel, trade, and information sharing, or the economic, legal, and cultural developments that decrease oppression and poverty and increase freedom and prosperity? 

It is certainly valuable to recognize and be grateful for what is good in our lives. But critically, we should also appreciate that long-term personal flourishing as well as human progress involves the ability to distinguish between dissatisfactions that are and are not warranted. The goal shouldn't be to entirely avoid negative psychological states or to treat them all as unhealthy or unproductive. Rather, the goal should be to learn to better differentiate between maladaptive dissatisfaction that merely produces suffering and adaptive dissatisfaction that motivates constructive change.

Think about the personal accomplishments you are proud of that have led to fulfillment and growth. To what extent were these accomplishments driven by dissatisfaction with your situation at the time? People change jobs, launch businesses, move to places with better opportunities, adopt new diets and exercise programs, cultivate new social networks, and engage in countless other transformative behaviors because they are not content with the status quo. These actions often involve embracing short-term discomfort in the pursuit of long-term flourishing.

In our contemporary understanding of wellbeing, we often treat current feelings and self-evaluations as good indicators of flourishing. For instance, if people report satisfaction with their lives, we conclude they are flourishing. If they report dissatisfaction, we assume they aren't flourishing. This simplistic framework fails to recognize the adaptive value of constructive dissatisfaction. I believe we need a more dynamic conception of flourishing that better reflects its agentic, emotionally complex, growth-oriented, and future-focused dimensions. 

This expanded view would help us better differentiate when dissatisfaction and other negative psychological states serve to help us improve our personal and shared futures. This perspective doesn't diminish the importance of positive mental states but instead places them within a broader framework of human flourishing and progress.

Have a great weekend!

Clay