Hunger and Dissatisfaction

or, How Burgers Got Me Through an Existential Crisis

For nearly as long as I can remember, I’ve felt this lingering sense of chronic dissatisfaction. A perpetual longing. And for as long as it’s been present, I’ve thought of it as a terrible affliction. It’s been the one internal crisis that continues to plague me, even though I’ve firmly established in my mind that I know I’m not going to come up with a meaty, satisfying answer. I just almost always feel as though something is…missing. What that is, I’m not quite sure. But I’m certain that there could be more. In Jonathan Safran Foer’s novel Everything is Illuminated, a little girl named Brod expresses the unnameable sadness to her father more succinctly than I feel like I ever could:

She spent an afternoon staring at their front door.

Waiting for someone? Yankel asked.

What color is this?

He stood very close to the door, letting the end of his nose touch the peephole. He licked the wood and joked, It certainly tastes like red.

Yes, it is red, isn’t it?

Seems so.

She buried her head in her hands. But couldn’t it be just a bit more red?

Most days, everything feels to me like it could be just a bit more red. This feeling is something I tend to associate with people who are creative/highly intelligent, the type of people I usually feel a connection and a sense of kinship with. Often I assume we’re all stuck in this tragic tortured-artist rut, like we understand something that everybody else doesn’t and our only solace is that we’re all sad and stuck on this planet together. Then I realize what a pretentious douche I sound like, and I try to stop thinking that way.

In his interview on The Great Discontent, though (aside: what an aptly named publication, right?), designer Frank Chimero delivers a swift kick to my self-absorbed, melancholy butt; he’s talking specifically about being satisfied creatively, but I think what he’s saying applies on a grander scale as well, and it really resonated with me. He says, “Your approval of your work metabolizes no matter what, and it doesn’t matter how good you are … What if we’re thinking about this all wrong? What if contentedness about your creative work is more like eating? … It doesn’t matter how good the meal is. A few hours later, you’re going to be hungry again. Maybe the reason you’re dissatisfied is not because the burger you just ate was bad, but because you’ve already eaten it—your body processes it. Doing the work makes you better, so of course you’ll be dissatisfied with what you’ve already done. You’re better!”

Huh. I don’t cry in the bathroom and become consumed by existential angst whenever I feel physically hungry, so I have to wonder why I assume that my mental/emotional/intellectual hunger is any different. Really, my life is like the burger. This is weird because I don’t actually eat meat, but for the sake of imagery we’re going to go with it. It’s not that I never have happy, fulfilling experiences—I do. And it’s not necessarily even that I have a ridiculous amount of terribly sad experiences, either—of course I’ve suffered heartbreak, loss, dropping my bagel on the ground immediately after I’ve left the bagel shop, but when I take a step back and look at things objectively, a significant majority of my problems could be solved by shifting my perspective. Constantly striving, wanting to do better, to be better, is not such a terrible thing. In fact, it’s actually pretty essential to the continuance of us humans being here on Earth—which, really, is not too bad a place to be. I guess I’m just hungry.