By Dr. Jim Bailey
Years ago, a friend helped me revamp my website. Early in our conversation, he asked, “What is the common theme for people who come to you for coaching services?” I responded, “Pain. People come to me because they are stuck in uncomfortable situations, and they hope I can help them find a way out of their discomfort.”
It’s an aspect of our modern lives that we look to “experts” for answers and relief from the pains of human life. Some, like me, even have the audacity to hang out a sign or write a book proposing to have those answers. A challenge faced by human services professionals is handling the expectations of those you serve. But helping someone find answers doesn’t ensure that she or he will also find relief.
History shows we Americans have a distinctive record for pursuing solutions to our discontent. In 1831, Alexis de Tocqueville, a Frenchman, visited America and found people “demoralized by their relentless pursuit of happiness.” In his book Democracy in America, he noted, “It is a strange thing to see with what sort of feverish ardour [enthusiasm] Americans pursue well-being and how they show themselves constantly tormented by a vague fear of not having chosen the shortest route that can lead to it.”
The pursuit of happiness, it would seem, isn’t simply one of the “unalienable rights endowed by the Creator” as it says in the Declaration of Independence; it is the American reality. This being the case, the question an honest and self-aware professional must ask themselves is, “What capacity do I have to help a client find lasting answers to the causes of their discomfort?” On the other hand, the person seeking relief should ask, “Do I have realistic expectations about what this person can do to help me?”
In their book Why We Are Restless: On the Modern Quest for Contentment, Benjamin and Jenna Storey examine the roots and possible answers to our societal unease from the differing perspectives of several philosophers: Michel de Montaigne, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Blaise Pascal. (Please note: Philosophy is not my area of expertise, so I apologize for any errors in my understanding, especially to those who know and/or love it.)
Michel de Montaigne, the Storeys say, proposed we need to learn to practice internal contentment rather than pursuing it through external means. Rousseau hypothesized that our situation could be redeemed by going “all in” in humanistic service to something outside ourselves. And Pascal reasoned that what we ultimately long for is something transcendent – truth, justice, love, eternity, and ultimately God.
De Montaigne’s conclusion mimics eastern religions and is currently popularized by the trends toward “mindfulness” and “being present.” Self-awareness and being content with what we have are undoubtedly important parts of the contentment question, but de Montaigne believed an individual had sufficient inner resources to define their own means to contentment. If that were the case, why do so many of us seek help from someone else? Ironically, on my website, you’ll see I position myself as a guide who understands you, your goals, and the work world from an objective perspective. My experiential bias is that we can rarely (if ever) fix ourselves by ourselves.
Rousseau pursued solitude, serving society, good citizenship, individualism, the pursuit of knowledge, and family as ways to connect with something deeper within himself. He eventually found each of these to be inadequate for attaining contentment. His family was dysfunctional, his friendships fell apart, civic service brought no lasting change, and his pursuit of knowledge brought him no rest. Even solitude brought no lasting answer to his discontent.
Both Rousseau’s and de Montaigne’s approaches take for granted that the solutions to our discontent may be found within ourselves or within human affairs, but their pursuit of happiness by those means ultimately led to discontent. To this, the Storeys offer the contrast of Blaise Pascal, who said the reason for our discontent is that the things we look to are ultimately inadequate to quiet our souls. In fact, Pascal would say that human beings are caught in a dilemma – while we can aspire to the things that would bring us contentment, our own ability to secure those things is ridiculously limited. We are each in a sense, starving and locked in a cage, eyeing delicious food on a plate that’s just beyond our reach.
C.S. Lewis said, “There are all sorts of things in this world that offer to give it [contentment] to you, but they never quite keep their promise… If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.” Ultimately, the Storeys argue that the philosophy we Americans have inherited, despite pretending to let us live as we please, produces remarkably consistent and unhappy lives. Why We Are Restless isn’t an easy read, but it makes the case that finding true contentment requires rethinking our most basic assumptions about happiness.