I. While searching for a new pair of black leather loafers, I came across a customer review that visualized a fundamental fracture in the way I interact with life.

I am not satisfied

Luis M. ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ Verified Purchase

Excellent pair and fits perfect and nice

Unironically, Luis M. has pushed me further toward a self-actualized consciousness than any philosophy, podcast, or piece of prose ever has. It would be easier to dismiss his blatant hypocrisy as a typo or a language barrier than to admit its effects. But reading the review left me immobilized, caught in the discomfort of recognition. I felt exposed, naked, at the legibility of my internal world. My own dynamics, unfiltered and unnamed, were suddenly reflected back at me with a clarity I had not granted myself.

5 stars, I am not satisfied. It was so simple.

I could not shake off the relatability of Luis’ dissatisfaction of the loafers despite the perceived excellence. I sent the review to a friend who shared a similar struggle and added the new phrase to our personal dictionary.

5 Stars I Am Not Sa·tis·ified faɪv ˈstɑrz ˈaɪ ˈæm ˈnɑt ˌsædɪsˈfaɪd/

a phrase used sarcastically with the pillow of humor to describe the feeling of discontentment or dissatisfaction for an event, experience, or thing despite its neutral or positive association

“I got the job I have been wanting but I do not feel anything. 5 stars, I am not satisfied.”

Similar: discontent dissatisfied malaise disgruntlement grievance unhappiness

The rest of the day, all I could fixate on was Luis M. Why was he not satisfied? If he was not satisfied, why did he rate the loafers 5 out of 5? The loafers were, and I quote, “excellent…[and] fits perfect and nice.” Why was that not enough? What was he hoping this pair of $70 tasseled black leather loafers were going to do for him? What prompted him to write the review, the greatness of the loafer or his grievance? In the days that followed, I was forced to come to terms with how often I quoted the phrase. Romantic gestures, job offers, and personal records in the gym were all prefixed by the absence of satisfaction despite my desire for the positive outcome. 5 stars but still, not satisfied.

Behind the psychology of satisfaction sits happiness, a word often used interchangeably to describe satisfaction. When we say happiness, we are naming the temporary state of feeling satisfied, while satisfaction itself is more eudaemonic, rooted in the being-ness of purpose. Happiness is to feeling as satisfaction is to being. You could argue that happiness (or satisfaction, depending on your view of their differences) has universal roots like autonomy or self-esteem that guarantees its presence. Satisfaction can emerge from many sources like the happiness of interpersonal relationships, the completion of long-pursued goals, or the alignment with a moral framework. The avenues through which fulfillment can be achieved are seemingly endless. And yet, despite this abundance of possibility, I remain unsatisfied.

Why?

II. The difference between 5 stars, I am not satisfied and simply I am not satisfied lies in the relationship between outcome and feeling. In the former, the outcome meets or even exceeds what I desired. And yet, the absence of satisfaction outweighs the perceived goodness of the result. I am not unsatisfied because the outcome failed me. I am unsatisfied because the feeling I expected to accompany it never arrived.

When you hold yourself to an ever-moving standard, purpose becomes dependent on outcome. Over time, this belief reorganizes itself to where purpose no longer precedes outcome as it is granted retroactively only if the outcome succeeds. What begins as motivation hardens into mathematics, this framework of purpose an equation. Satisfaction follows only if the equation balances. If it does not, nothing is conferred and the thirst for meaning, rest, and relief are not quenched.

The equation begins like this:

$Desire + Effort = Outcome$

$Outcome = Purpose$

$Purpose=Satisfaction$

OR

$1+1=2$

$2=2$

$2=2$

Because purpose cannot exist without outcome and satisfaction cannot exist without purpose, the variables begin feeding each other until they are indistinguishable. Eventually, dependency compounds and the equation becomes:

$Desire + Outcome = Purpose = Satisfaction$

OR

$1 + 2 = 3 = 3$

Attachment is a silent constant. It is the driving force behind the value of outcome, or the reason why success feels like meaning. Purpose does not generate the desire; desire clings to outcome in hopes of becoming purpose.

Now remove attachment. If we assign attachment as zero, outcome becomes zero.

$Desire + (attachment)Outcome = 1$

OR

$1 + (0)1 =1$

Outcome’s capacity to satisfy depends entirely on the value, or meaning, attachment assigned to it. Without attachment, outcome carries no inherited purpose. Satisfaction therefore collapses and the equation returns nothing. Right?

But desire still remains.

Desire was never the byproduct of purpose. It was the only constant in the equation. If purpose never created desire, desire was simply waiting to be allowed to stand on its own, unmeasured, and no longer required to justify itself through outcome.

$Desire = 1$

III. The absence of contentment I feel when a desired outcome fails to satisfy is inhabited simultaneously by a deep sense of gratitude. Gratitude and dissatisfaction coexist uneasily.

For the first time in my life, I can say with confidence that I am exactly where I am supposed to be. I recognize the materialization of my desires all around me as gifts, not expectations. I am also grateful for what is actively unfolding. There is no urgency in me to force clarity, no compulsion to act, produce, or optimize. There is only being. Whether I should register this detachment as relief or as threat still remains unclear. Perhaps it is both. What I do know is that without outcome as my anchor, certainty dissolves with it. After building a life on the familiar metrics of clarity, the same metrics by which I measured my safety, my progress, and my worth, what do I do now?

This state of absence, or what some might call peace, has become a source of internal struggle comparable to the attachment it replaced. The removal of procurement did not immediately produce relief in my life.

It produced disorientation.

I am now so present within my life that feeling has shifted from reaction to condition. My emotions exists as states of being rather than as responses to circumstance. I am sad because I am, not because an experience has made me sad. I am happy because I am happy, not because an event has justified it. This leaves an even more uncomfortable question: was the issue ever ingratitude or is gratitude insufficient when meaning is no longer externally sourced?

It is also possible that I relied on external objects as placeholders for desire, outsourcing meaning as a form of dissociation. If so, then the discomfort I feel now may not be absence, but unmediated presence. I cannot yet tell whether what I am experiencing is loss, recalibration, or the cost of seeing life without an anesthetic.

Shifting toward an internal locus of control, one that is less dependent on outcome or external validation, is only as liberating as it can be. Rather than resolving dissatisfaction, it only complicates it. Personal responsibility intensifies as without experience to blame, my emotions no longer have an external anchor. Meaning must be carried internally.

Recently, I was driving with my brother when he asked me what my happiest memory was. I was struck less by the question itself than by the fact that he asked it at all. There was something unexpectedly deliberate in the way this teenage boy, usually uninterested in conversations that extend beyond “How are you?” “Good.”, paused long enough to want an answer.

I considered the question carefully. After a few minutes, I told him about my graduation day. I described the feeling of seeing my friends lined up, congratulating me, acknowledging the accomplishment.

The answer was coherent.

It made sense.

And yet, it wasn’t entirely true.

In reality, my mind had gone blank. I could not locate a moment that felt unmistakably happy. Not because such moments did not exist, but because none rose to the surface with certainty. As if he sensed the hesitation beneath my response, my brother said, “You don’t get happy a lot, do you? It seems like it takes a lot for you.”

I was shocked by how visibly apparent it was. That even a fourteen year old, immersed in the noise of adolescence and indifference, could recognize the effort it takes for joy to register in me.

I am unsure whether this is a diagnosis or dramatization. But the discomfort itself feels instructive. It suggests that the question my brother asked was never about the memory at all, but about my access to it.

When I look back at my life and the experiences that filled it, and then look at myself now, I can trace how I evolved. And yet, I move through the world as though something has been taken from me. There is a persistent hum of absence, a void that expands and contracts at its own discretion, seemingly indifferent to all external circumstances. It does not respond proportionally to what is happening around me. It simply is.

The most accurate way I can describe the relationship between my body, mind, and emotions is grammatical. My body exists in the first person. I am fully embodied and fully present. My mind operates in the second person by observing, addressing, and narrating itself. My emotions, however, can register in the third person. They are experienced at a distance, as though they belong to someone else. Happiness, in particular, arrives this way. I feel it not as something happening to me, but as something I am witnessing, similar to the happiness one feels while reading about the joy of a character in a book. The feeling is real, but its intimacy is diluted. It is absorbed, processed, and understood without fully being felt.

I am uncertain whether I am overthinking this absence of overthinking or simply observing my own cognitive state with greater attention.

I am though, undeniably thinking.

What still remains unclear is whether this reflects dissatisfaction or a form of detachment that feels unfamiliar because it lacks the intensity I once associated with caring. Detachment, however, may not be the correct term. I continue to care deeply and to feel deeply. I have experienced attachment before and this does not resemble it. There is no compulsion and no sense of clinging. This raises the possibility that what I am experiencing is not detachment at all, but integration. Into a state in which emotional responsiveness remains intact, with no singular stimulus overwhelming the system as a whole.

Everything effects me, therefore, nothing effects me.

Oscar Wilde once said:

“At present, people see fogs, not because there are fogs, but because poets and painters have taught them the mysterious loveliness of such effects. There may have been fogs for centuries in London. I dare say there were. But no one saw them, and so we do not know anything about them. They did not exist till art had invented them.”

Oscar Wilde, The Decay of Lying

But if life imitates art rather than the other way around, with meaning something we assign rather than inherit, then removing attachment, the primary source through which it once generated meaning, leaves us alone with desire. The question then is whether desire is the sole force sustaining life. We are forced to consider if our egos have adapted a little too efficiently or whether detachment, once a strategy for survival, has quietly become the architecture of suffering. What we previously understood as clarity may now function as erosion.

From here, the question shifts even further toward meaning itself. If emotional weight is assigned rather than inherited or if events are experienced as positive or negative through interpretation alone, then this perceived neutrality may not signify emptiness. But even the recalibration of value, where meaning is no longer reflexively imposed but more selectively constructed, still is not enough.

To identify the lack of satisfaction does not restore it, especially when satisfaction, upon closer inspection, was never a stable state to begin with. Death becomes our only beacon of hope to understand our obligation to persist with coherence as we search for relief.

IV. Death, at its core, is not merely the cessation of biology, but the end of a narrative. It is the collapsing of all efforts, identities, responsibilities, and becomings. In this sense, when the psyche longs for the pleasures of relief, or the absence of having to persist as a coherent subject, it defaults to the only socially acceptable experiences in which this relief is temporarily granted: sleep and orgasms.

Sleep is the most explicit example. We do not crave sleep because it restores us since restoration is only rationalized afterword. What we crave in sleep is the surrender.

To find the moment in which we move ourselves consciously into relinquishment, dissolving self into non-experience. We become absolved of authorship since no decisions can be made, no meanings are maintained, and time passes without our awareness. For several hours every day, we do not exist.

We die everyday and wait to die tomorrow.

Orgasms operate in a different frequency, with greater intensity and shorter duration. At climax, the self is annihilated, with the infrastructure of language, thought, and identity collapsing into a singular sensation. Ego loses coherence and disappears into the experience. You lose yourself since the act itself is naturally subtractive.

In both cases, the interruption of subjectivity becomes addictive. There are moments in which the self is allowed to cease without punishment. You can argue that sleep and sex feels restorative because we leave being given something. But on the contrary, both acts are restorative because they are the only things that temporarily take everything away.

When the burden of being becomes too heavy, these two states are often compulsively sought under the conditions of overwhelm. Sleep and orgasms become technologies of escape from the demand to continuously be someone. These experiences allow us to flirt with the void of nothingness. I cannot ethically call this suicidal since it would be inaccurate within this framework, though it invites contemplation by technicality since they are similar by structure, not intention. There may be no desire to end life, but there is a desire to suspend selfhood.

Since these are the only moments in which we are permitted to practice not-being without moral consequence and that these acts are often the first to be abused in overwhelm, this suggests that humans are biologically unable to withstand uninterrupted consciousness.

If what requires us to sleep everyday is a relief from being and not a physiological need, or if sex addiction is escapism from responsibility and not uncontrollable lust, then what does that say on the fragility of survival?

V. If the only moments we allows ourselves to stop existing are those disguised as health or pleasure, then perhaps our suffering is not from a desire to die at all, but from a world that refuses to allow absence without justification.

My insistence on depth may not be purely a hunger for connection or purpose but a functioning method of refined self-avoidance. When an internal landscape feels inaccessible, depth becomes something to be sought externally, extracting from the people, ideas, experiences, or meanings of others. Curiosity replaces the need for presence since it substitutes feeling for grandiosity.

In this way, the depth I demand from life is proportional to the emptiness I am attempting to outrun. The larger the internal absence is, the more expansive the desire for meaning becomes.

So if it is not that I want to be satisfied but that satisfaction has functioned as the condition under which I have permitted myself to exist, then the removal of desire strips away the final scaffolding.

What remains is stillness.

A state without pursuit, without outcome, without justification, without narrative, without urgency, without interpretation, without promise, without the comfort of becoming, without the fear of being, without destination, without distraction, without projection, without rescue, without belief, without arrival, without explanation, without permission, without the illusion of something else arriving, or even the permission to remain.

No reward, no confirmation.

Is.

Was that always the point?

Note: I bought the loafers. They looked nice but were not comfortable for long distances.