Dissatisfaction Avoidance
Everybody is familiar with the feeling of being unfulfilled, that things aren’t going the way you expect them to be. It is something we called dissatisfaction.
Dissatisfaction makes people look outwards with envy and inwards with disappointment, that their life is far more colorless and dull than others. Pop cultures, social media and almost all self-improvement product advertisement makes this worse by saying that you’re not trying good enough, that everything less than everyone’s dream job is failure, that you need to constantly have great experiences, to be conventionally attractive, have a lot of friends, and there are others that have all these things are genuinely happy.
There are few ways for everyone to prevent the horror of dissatisfaction that slowly can become self hatred. I’ll try to explain my view on how I tried to prevent the overwhelming feeling of dissatisfaction that sometimes come with insecurities.
1. Negative visualization of the world
this may sound dispiriting, but you can overcome the feeling of being unsatisfied with being “pessimistic” or rather realistic to be precise. This means that you need to expect the worst to happen one way or another. This kind of mental reminder might help you when you’re being drowned in dissatisfaction and insecurities, because you realize nothing is perfect in the first place.
2. Realize that you’re not in control
the only thing that you can fully control is your own thought and actions. This means realizing that you’re not in control of everything makes you realize that not everything will happen according to your expectations despite your efforts or everything you’ve sacrificed to be at that point in life. That is why we only need to do our best to make the reality come as close to our expectations.
3. Murphy’s Law
Edward Aloysius Murphy Jr, an aerospace engineer stated “if something can go wrong, it most likely will”. Remembering this sentence can give you an overview that things can always go wrong despite your best effort. Things will most likely go wrong and mess with your expectations and eventually also give you some sort of dissatisfaction.
4. Practice Gratitude
We shouldn’t drown in dissatisfaction, while this may sounds like just another typical self improvement gibberish, but gratitude really comes a long way since we can’t really expect things to go the way we wanted. Gratitude also helps you with a lot of things such as reducing stress and improving your emotional regulation which also will aid you when things gets tough.
Eventually, we need to understand that life is complicated in the first place. Sometimes we feel like we’re in control of everything and nothing seems going to go wrong, but sometimes we feel the other way around. We just need to try our best with everything we can do to make sure our expectations come as close as possible to the reality, even though sometime it won’t. To be honest, that is fine because your “best” is never going to be the same everyday anyway. Some days when we just not feeling any motivations to get some work done, try to get out and get some sun is enough for you. We all know that sometimes chasing the satisfaction of happiness can make you more unhappy with all of the pressure the world has put us under.
Nobody’s perfect, and that is how things should always be. Please, take it easy on yourself.