Sean Johnson :: Intentionally – Live on Purpose

Being unsatisfied is like a drug.

It gives you something to push towards. Or many things. Or some vague nothingness that nonetheless drives you forward.

When things go great, when something is accomplished or a gift given, it’s often almost anti-climactic – the attainment is often less gratifying than the desire that preceded it.

But being unsatisfied isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. There’s a reason why some of the world’s more “successful” people are also the most lonely, the most unsettled. The habit of being unsatisfied becomes so entrenched that long after getting everything they originally set their eyes on, they still feel underwhelmed, like something is missing.

I would argue that what we really need is contentment. Gratitude. A thankful heart.

A thankful heart is what allows you to decide that four cars is enough. Or that one car is. Or (gasp) that public transit is fine.

A thankful heart is what reminds you that another 80 hour work week in the name of providing for your family is silly given that your family already has food, shelter, the ability to see a doctor. Contentment is what compels you to turn the Blackberry off and enjoy an evening or a weekend with your wife and kids who are well fed but desperately miss their dad.

A thankful heart is what helps someone realize that they have enough. That the highest and best use for their resources might not be themselves, but rather people who weren’t given the skills and the intelligence and the discipline and the luck that they were.

Of course the world will never tell us this. We are all bombarded by thousands of messages telling us that we should never be satisfied. Planned obsolescence tells us that the iPhone we were given a year ago is rubbish and desperately needs to be replaced. Advertisements tell us that the key to our happiness is an SUV, some body spray and a television set that can also order you dinner.

It’s even infected religion – the refrain from pulpits is that there is a hole in your heart, a piece of you is missing, and that the answer is God. And that once you’re on the team, you will have a life of abundance, generally measured in dollars. Greed and discontent, hiding behind a dude with a Bible, white teeth and a fake tan.

Problem is the Bible doesn’t say that. Quite the opposite – the people who took God seriously were fed to lions, thrown into fire, crucified, stoned to death, beaten, thrown in jail, exiled or beheaded. The people who wanted to be a part of the movement were told to quit striving for what the world strives for and to be immensely grateful for what they had, to the point that the natural expression of their joy was to share all they had with others.

Abundance never meant money, status or power. Abundance was first and foremost an inward heart of gratitude, and a life of peaceful joy.

While in many ways people back then had it harder than we do, in one way our lives are much more difficult. We live in a part of the world that experiences unprecedented affluence. We literally have everything at our fingertips. We work hard, strive for excellence, are consistently driven to achieve, to attain, to accomplish. We are the wealthiest people who have ever lived. And we’re miserable.

The reason there’s such a gap between the rich and the poor today is because we’re unsatisfied. We’re in the top 1% of the world in wealth but we’re too busy looking up at the .01% to see the 99% below us.

Because we want more. We cling to everything we have and covet what little we don’t. Many of us never even pause to consider that no generation has ever had it this good.

We’re addicted to dissatisfaction.

This Thanksgiving, I’m trying to really think about how ridiculously lucky I am. Trying to step back and realize that there are more important things than stock options or wealth preservation. That my life is, by any reasonable standard, pretty amazing. And I’m hoping to carry that sense of contentment with me into the rest of the year.

It won’t be easy – the media doesn’t want me to be content, many of the people I know (if they’re honest) don’t either. But once you realize that dissatisfaction is a hunger that can never be satiated, the only logical response is to do whatever it takes to learn to be thankful. To quick cold turkey.

Happy Thanksgiving.

There’s an opportunity right now, and I fear I will let the opportunity completely pass it by.

2 billion people in the world live on less than $2 per day. 1.8 million children die each year because they don’t have clean drinking water.

And I sit at a fancy dinner with my friends, polishing off the second bottle of wine, lamenting the fact that my 401k has lost 25% of it’s worth this year. I fret because I might have to put off purchasing a new suit or a cinema display.

I’m inconvenienced by the economic downturn, while millions of people around the world are getting destroyed.

Argentina went through a period of hyperinflation not too long ago that took out 80% of the country’s wealth and virtually wiped out the middle class. When my wife and I were there this past March we saw the lingering effects – thousands of families bringing large white bins into town on trains, picking up cardboard that’s been left on the streets to sell for tiny amounts of money. People that used to have jobs, that worked hard, had their entire lives torn apart by an economic tsunami.

We would spend hours over dinner talking about how crazy it was that these people would have to bring themselves down to that level in order to survive, while their neighbors (ex-coworkers? ex-friends?) would walk right by them with their fancy clothes to the club. Ignoring them entirely. Thinking to themselves “well, that’s how life works. Glad it’s not me.”

We couldn’t understand it – it wasn’t like watching a kid in Africa on some DVD. It wasn’t far away – it was right in front of them. And they ignored it.

We were disgusted. And then we ordered another bottle of wine and talked about how great our $20 steak was.

There’s an opportunity in all of this. I’m fairly certain that we’re heading towards a major economic disaster – that the worst is yet to come. I think that picture of Buenos Aires isn’t too far from what our world could be like in the next 10 years.

And assuming I survive it without joining the ranks of those devastated, I have a choice. I can cling ever tighter to my money, and sit in my house thinking smugly about how I was just more talented or luckier than those fools outside…

Or I can soften my heart. I can remember that more than just about anything else, my God’s heart was for the poor, the broken, the disenfranchised.

The church has a long, rich history of coming to its senses during times of crisis, but I’m concerned that we are no longer a people who know our history, who know about our God’s heart for “the least of these”, who really believe that the purpose of all the wealth they’ve amassed over the last 40 years was their own consumption.

I’m praying that a nation of Christians who for decades have become drunk on excess finally see the incredible disparity between them and their neighbors (which for the first time in history includes people from the other side of the world). I’m praying they wake up and see that the three cars and the McMansions and the spas and the Prada bags have done nothing but blind them to the incredible pain in the world.

I’m praying that we figure out that one of the reasons this generation is so disenfranchised with the church is that it seems more concerned with building a bigger sanctuary or electing a President that won’t raise their taxes than it is practicing the same spirit of radical love that the God they follow appears to deem so important.

The upheaval of the last few months can be that catalyst. It has the potential to be a wakeup call. And we can either complain about how our nest egg has shrunk, or we can confront the reality that all around us people who previously had very little now have nothing.

It’s an opportunity I pray that I take advantage of, that my church takes advantage of.