Can't get no satisfaction?

When The Rolling Stones released these words 61 years ago, I wonder if they knew how bang-on their prediction was for the future.

Most people I speak to carry with them some degree of dissatisfaction. Not in a greedy way, but in a ‘is this it?’ or ‘am I doing it right?’ kind of way.

Dissatisfaction is sneaky. It isn’t loud, but rather, it compounds like interest. It builds up slowly over time until it becomes undeniable.

Our nervous systems don’t just wake up one day and decide to respond to our email inbox like there’s a good chance it contains a pack of bears. That happened slowly, over time.

This is why dissatisfaction should be seen as the signal it is, rather than any sort of failure. All it is doing is reminding you of what you already suspect: There’s got to be more for me than this.

I truly believe this desire for more is human nature. No matter how rich/happy/successful they are, I’m yet to meet anyone who doesn’t have these two data points in their life:

Point A: Where they are.

Point B: Where they’d like to be.

We still believe — even subconsciously — that point B is a destination that will be well lit and signposted. If we just follow the right steps, eventually we’ll arrive and we definitely won’t get distracted by the messy cupboard on the way. In the meantime, we’re out here doing the most: optimising every moment, replacing rest with tackling that mounting pile of life admin, and scheduling our lives within an inch of … their lives.

Wanting more isn’t just desire on fire within us; it’s a survival tactic. Homes cost more than ever — around nine times the average annual wage today in Australia (and significantly higher in cities such as Sydney), compared to roughly three to four times back when our parents were buying. Fuel, travel, education, groceries and living costs are all through the roof. We don’t just want more; we need it.

We have this very real driver for wanting, challenged by bodies and brains built to shift us toward pleasure and away from pain. Couch + TV = pleasure. Late nights grinding at our laptops = pain.

So we straddle a giant inflatable unicorn pool toy we ordered from Temu, trying not to drown in the pool of the messy middle between where we are now and where we want to be.

Life is, by all accounts, bloody great... so why do we feel so dissatisfied?

This isn’t a modern problem (outside of the Temu bit), it’s one bright minds have been trying to crack the code on for centuries. My dad was a fan of Carl Jung, the Swiss psychiatrist and founder of analytical psychology who spent the early twentieth century trying to map the inner life of human beings. I grew up hearing his name around the house the way other kids might hear about football players or rock stars.

Jung believed that the psyche will get what it needs one way or another. That inner conflict — the restlessness, the dissatisfaction, the creeping sense something isn’t quite right even when everything looks fine from the outside — isn’t a malfunction.

It’s a message from the psyche, demanding your attention. And if you don’t listen, life has a way of turning up the psyche’s volume until you do.

Jung talked about the first half of life as being necessarily outward-facing: building the structures, collecting the credentials and constructing the self as per the packet instructions. This part of life is about the career, the relationship, the home and maybe the pets or little people you put in it. It’s about building the version of you that makes sense on paper.

Then at some point, something shifts. The structures you built stop feeling sound and start feeling shaky. The things you chased either didn’t arrive or they arrived and didn’t feel how you thought they would. Instead of stopping to celebrate their arrival, you just swapped them for shinier objects to chase. And you find yourself in the messy middle: not bad, but not quite good either.

Jung was onto this a century ago. The crisis isn’t the problem — it’s the invitation. Your dissatisfaction is a signal that it’s time to stop building outward and start looking inward; to ask not, ‘What more can I get?’ but, ‘What more do I actually want?’

You have options. You can keep bumbling along with your dissatisfaction riding shotgun — with the half-sorted cupboard, the reams of to-do items you never quite get to implement, in the life that looks fine but feels like it’s missing something. Or, you can stop stifling the whisper with external noise and start getting honest about what it’s trying to tell you.

I’d love to hear, does this resonate for you? And, how good are The Stones?

Til next time,

Casey x

P.S. If you enjoy this, please share it with someone you think would too.

P.P.S. I just got the first round of endorsements (fancy people saying fancy things) in for my new book More and TBH I almost fell off my chair. I can’t wait to share them with you. The book drops November 1 and if you enjoy my writing — you’ll love this. Pre-orders are a big deal for small authors, so I’d be endlessly grateful for the support if you have a moment to pre-order a copy from Amazon here or Booktopia here. Thank youuuuuuuuu! BTW… how pretty is the cover? Swoon…