I have been thinking a lot lately about what actually makes us satisfied with our lives. Or maybe satisfaction isn’t even the right word.
For a long time, I think I assumed happiness and satisfaction were more or less the same thing and that both were somehow the goal. You build a life you like, surround yourself with people you love, find work that matters to you, hopefully create some security, and eventually you arrive at a place where you feel pretty good about all of it.
Except I have many of those things now. More than I imagined I would have when I was younger. I love my family. I have work that is meaningful to me. I have people I love and a life I am genuinely grateful for. And I still sometimes feel restless. For a long time, I have been too quick to call that unhappiness. Lately I’ve been wondering if it is something else.
I am the child of Cuban immigrants whose lives were completely upended when they left their country. My parents had to start over here, and for a long time their purpose wasn’t some abstract search for fulfillment. It was survival. It was building a life, creating security and making sure their children had opportunities they hadn’t had.
I think I absorbed much more of that than I understood at the time. As I look back now, I survived along with them. Survival was also my general nervous system state— even when nothing terrible was happening, some part of me was always preparing, achieving, securing. I believed there were things I could do that would make me safe.
Education mattered enormously in my family. So did hard work and accomplishment. I spent a lot of my younger years trying to prove that I was smart and, underneath that, probably trying to prove that I was worthy. My parents never made me feel like I needed to prove myself. That came from other places, including, I think, from myself. All that said, I didn’t know that was what I was doing. I just knew there was always another thing to accomplish.
So I did.
I went to school and then went back to school and then went back again. I spent close to 30 years earning degrees and following a professional path that made sense. I wasn’t miserable. There were parts of my work I loved, and those years gave me experiences I wouldn’t trade. But when I look back, I can see that I wasn’t always making particularly intentional decisions about where I was going. I was mostly doing the next right thing. And I was very good at doing the next right thing.
I think this happens to a lot of us. We ask people at 17 or 18 what they want to do with their lives when they haven’t had enough life yet to really know. We ask them to pick colleges and majors and career paths, and then we reward forward movement. There is always a next step and usually some way to know whether you’re doing it well.
Eventually my own therapist helped me see that some of the reasons I thought I couldn’t change careers weren’t really reasons at all. Some were obstacles I had put in my own way. I went back to school and started over professionally at an age when I was already established in another career. It was scary and humbling. I was old enough to be competent and instead I was choosing to be a beginner again.
Becoming a therapist felt different, though. It wasn’t simply the next thing. I had interrupted the sequence and made a choice. I think that experience changed something in me. Not because I finally found the one thing I was supposed to do with my life. I’m not sure I believe there is one thing. But I learned what it felt like to make a decision because something felt like mine rather than because it was the obvious next step.
Now I find myself in midlife asking different versions of some of those same questions. This time, though, I’m not looking to change careers or leave the life I have built. I love much of what I have built. Being a mother is and always will be one of the central parts of who I am, even as what mothering looks like changes as my son gets older. I love my family. I love my work, and I have enjoyed growing a business immensely.
The question is less about what I want to leave and more about how I want to live inside the life I already have. There is something strange about reaching a point when you have many of the things you once thought you were working toward. I know that I have a lot. I also know that having a lot doesn’t magically turn off desire and I don’t actually think it should.
I used to have a complicated relationship with deserving. I think I believed that good things were things you earned by working hard enough, being good enough, accomplishing enough. I understand where that came from. My parents’ experience taught them that security could disappear and that hard work mattered.
But I don’t believe anymore that our worth is the prize we receive for working hard enough. I believe we are inherently worthy. I believe we are allowed to want good things for ourselves without first presenting evidence that we have earned them.
I don’t mean that any of us is entitled to get everything we want. Life obviously doesn’t work that way. I mean that I no longer believe our basic worth is something we earn through productivity, achievement or suffering. There is a difference between working for the things we want and believing that the work is what makes us deserving of a good life. That has taken me a long time to learn.
So this isn’t an essay about deciding that I should want less. I don’t particularly want to want less. I like experiences and travel and beautiful things. I like creating things and having things to look forward to. I am fortunate to have choices that earlier generations of my family worked very hard to make possible for me, and I don’t want to feel guilty for enjoying them.
But I have become curious about wanting. There is pleasure in getting something we want, obviously, but there is also pleasure in the wanting itself. It gives us something to anticipate. Something to research or plan or imagine. For me, I think it can also provide motion, and motion is very familiar to me. Motion helped me survive, after all—and there is definitely more to explore there.
When I look back, there was always another degree. Another goal. Another thing to work toward. Now there can always be another trip, another project, another idea, another thing I suddenly decide would be wonderful to have.
Most of the time that is just fun. But not always. Sometimes I think wanting can keep us occupied. If there is always something out in front of us, we don’t have to spend quite as much time asking ourselves how we feel standing still. That is uncomfortable for me to admit, but I think it is true.
It also doesn’t mean that the things themselves are meaningless. Many of the things I have wanted as an adult represent things that were less available to me growing up. They can represent security and freedom and choice. There is something powerful about being able to give yourself things or experiences that once felt inaccessible. I don’t want to pathologize that. I also don’t want to be completely unconscious about it.
Maybe that’s part of what I’m trying to understand at this stage of my life: the difference between enjoying what I have and the life I’ve built, enjoying wanting more, and expecting either one to make me permanently satisfied.
Psychology actually distinguishes happiness from life satisfaction and from meaning. We can feel happy in a moment and still have questions about our lives. We can also be going through something painful and still experience our lives as deeply meaningful.
Viktor Frankl wrote about this in Man’s Search for Meaning, although under circumstances so horrific that I am always hesitant to reduce his work to an easy lesson about everyday life. Frankl survived Nazi concentration camps, and his work afterward centered on the importance of meaning in human life. What I find useful isn’t the simplified idea that everyone needs to “find their purpose.” It is the recognition that meaning and happiness aren’t interchangeable.
I think I have treated them as though they were for too long. If I was restless, something must be wrong. If I wanted something else, I must not appreciate what I had. If I had a good life and still didn’t feel completely satisfied, maybe I wasn’t happy enough. I’m beginning to think those conclusions were too simple.
There is also the Harvard Study of Adult Development, which has followed people across their lives for decades and has repeatedly found how much our relationships matter to our well-being.
None of that is particularly shocking. Most of us probably already know that the people we love matter more than the things we accumulate. Knowing something and organizing our lives around it aren’t always the same thing.
Achievement is particularly seductive because it is measurable. I know how to measure things. Degrees can be counted. Work has outcomes. Goals can be completed. There is always some external evidence available to tell us whether we are doing well.
For someone who spent a lot of her life trying to prove she was smart and worthy, that system worked remarkably well. Until I didn’t need it quite so much anymore.
Maybe that is the part of midlife I wasn’t expecting.
For many years, life provides a lot of structure. There is school and work and family and raising children and paying bills and taking care of people. The next thing is usually right in front of you. Eventually, if you are lucky, there can be a little more room.
My son is older now. He doesn’t need less of a mother, but he needs me differently. My career is no longer something I’m trying to figure out how to begin. I have more freedom and more choices than I used to have.
That said, I thought more choice would automatically produce more satisfaction. I’m not sure it does. Sometimes it just produces more questions.
There are parts of me that still want to build and create and work. There are parts that want to travel and play and experience more. There is a part that likes having something to look forward to and another that is curious about what it would feel like not to need the next thing quite so quickly. I don’t think I need to choose between those parts. And I don’t think the answer is to become someone who stops wanting.
Maybe the work for me now is simply noticing. Noticing when I am pursuing something because I really want it and when I am pursuing it because forward motion feels good. Noticing when achievement is meaningful and when I am using it as an old measure of worth. Letting myself enjoy what I have without demanding that it make me permanently satisfied. And maybe allowing restlessness to exist without immediately deciding that it means I am unhappy is essential.
I have a good life. I can say that without qualification. I have people I love, a family that matters enormously to me, work I chose and care deeply about, and opportunities I don’t take for granted.
For a long time, I think I expected all of that to eventually produce a feeling of arrival. I thought there would be some point when I had done enough and built enough and had enough that the wanting would quiet down and I would feel satisfied.
It hasn’t really worked that way. There is still another place I want to go, something I want to do, an idea I want to pursue. Sometimes that’s simply because I’m curious and I like having things to look forward to. Sometimes I suspect it’s because forward motion is what I know. I’m trying to get better at knowing the difference.
But the bigger change may be that I’m no longer so sure any of this means I’m unhappy. Maybe I have expected too much from satisfaction. I’ve treated it almost like a verdict on my life: if I have enough and I’m still restless, something must be missing. If I’m happy, I shouldn’t want something different tomorrow. If I’m grateful, what I have should feel like enough all the time.
None of that really makes sense when I say it out loud. I can love my life without feeling satisfied by every part of it all the time. I can enjoy wanting something without believing I’ll be different once I have it. I can still be ambitious without needing the next accomplishment to tell me anything about my worth.
I don’t know exactly what I want the next part of my life to look like. There are things I still want to build and things I want to experience, and I’m sure there are things I don’t even know to want yet. I actually like that.
What I want to stop doing is using every period of restlessness as evidence that something is wrong. Maybe I’ve been asking myself the wrong question. Instead of asking why a good life hasn’t made me permanently satisfied, maybe I can accept that it was never supposed to. I know I am not unhappy. I also know I’m still restless sometimes. Maybe I don’t have to resolve that contradiction—-just aim to understand it better.