If we can reframe our expectations, then we won’t be so surprised when we get something good and it doesn’t seem good enough, and we can more easily start to notice what is good about it and not what isn’t. I think that gets easier when you add it to another strategy, to remember that God has promised us full satisfaction someday that’s rooted in who he is and in the fact that we’ll be with him.

An Old Problem

Why does life feel unsatisfying? It really does, doesn’t it? And more often than we wish that it did. It’s an old problem, and one of my favorite places in the Bible is the book of Ecclesiastes, where this guy had it all. He had a chance to do everything he set out to do. He had a chance to enjoy all the pleasures he ever wanted to enjoy. He had more money than anybody. He had more wisdom than anybody. He had it all. And he gets to the end of his life, he looks back at it all, and he just says, “Vanity, striving after wind.” It seems to me like the average middle-class American lifestyle now is basically just getting a chance to learn what he learned. What only the upper, upper, upper crust of his ancient world could find out, we now all get a chance to learn because of how comfortable and prosperous the average American middle-class life is.

I’ve been so struck by recent studies that have shown that even as life has gotten so much better in so many different metrics, people feel worse and worse. The better we have it, the more pronounced our depression or, at least, unhappiness. What is that about? I think there’s a lot of mystery to it at one level.

And I think we’re pouring gas on that fire in modern society more often than not because of one of the biggest lies we’re tempted to believe. Because our society is so consumeristic, we tend to think the answer to the question and the reason we’re so dissatisfied is to say, That thing over there, I haven’t gotten it yet. I’ll have it soon, so let me do whatever it’s going to take to grab that. Then I’ll be good.

We have money, time, and skill at our disposal to keep grabbing for more. And every time we lay hold of something, it is vapor. It’s empty. We have confused our satisfaction problem for a problem of possession, as if owning something could put an end to it.

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