The (In)Complete Gratification.
I find it amusing how the grass always seems greener on the other side. Be it any aspect of our lives- age, career, relationships, status, wealth, success and the list goes on. There is an innate sense of curiosity that haunts us throughout our lives- the curiosity to know more, to know what lies on the other side of it. We never seem to be content with our share (and I know I sound like an old lady lecturing about life, but somewhere deep down we all know that this is the truth).
The other day my father was showing me this talk show where Simon Sinek, was sharing his thoughts on the Millennials and their problem of instant gratification. It is true that our generation is extremely impatient with our needs. We are way advanced technologically and have pretty much everything on our finger tips. We are way more ambitious than our previous generations but we hardly put in half as much efforts to achieve what we want. Everything we want comes in too easily (I mean what more can you expect in a world having ‘facilitators’ like Alexa and Swiggy). But what intrigues me more than the tendency of this instant gratification among our generations, is the age old tendency to desire the exact opposite of what we have in our lives, that is the — “Incomplete Gratification”. This constant feeling of incomplete gratification is worse than our habit of seeking instant gratification. And it is this very reason that we are hardly ever content with our lives. There is always this small part of us that constantly wishes to be on the other side of the game.
This tendency finds its most common occurrence in the aspect of our life-cycle. Kids always want to grow up and be like their adolescent siblings, adolescents want to be like the adults around them, middle aged adults want to go back to their childhood and the old want to be back to the active years of their life (I am no exception to it, I too want to get over with my studies and start working). This cycle of desire is very vicious and monotonous. But we fail to understand the presence of this fixed cycle in the first place. If we just had one stage of our life on a replay throughout, we would soon feel so claustrophobic that we would just end up wanting to end it.
The next most popular and ironic situation is Relationships. Every relationship, just like our lives, has fixed phases of development. The Infant stage, where the world seems as beautiful and rosy as Wordsworth’s poems- all romantic and happy. Well technically it is not our fault. We have been conditioned by the media and the creative minds of our society to build dream castles around notions like ‘Together Forever’. We all love watching rom-coms and reading chick-lits with a ‘Happily-Ever After’ ending(oh the sweet lies they can make one believe in so strongly, it’s almost as bad as treachery). But can you imagine the effect of those same 2 hour long movies or the 200 pages long books being stretched for a lifetime. The drudgery of it will slowly suck the happiness out of it. I have often heard people say that their partners have changed after getting married. Imagine your husband being the same old 20 year old — carefree, fun-loving and irresponsible. As intriguing as it sounds initially, it will soon lead to numerous problems regarding their lack of maturity. You know there was this dialogue in the movie Inside–Out that changed my outlook towards life -
“No one can go through life feeling amazing all the time. It’s normal to feel down every once in a while. Without the hard times, how would we know we’re in the good times?”
As much as we do desire a change in our surroundings and our lives, we are equally skeptical about accepting it too. Every phase of life is like a challenge for us. Once we have won it, we begin with our next conquest. And slowly as we clear each conquest and move forward in life, we sense the inevitable end approaching us and long to go back to our previous conquests, wining them again and again to continue being in the game forever, though each time playing it a bit differently (basically when we say, “I wish I could go back in time and correct my mistakes”). We all eye our mortality as one of our biggest weaknesses. I consider it to be a boon. Immortality is the curse instead. The very thought of leading a supposedly 80-year spanned life for an infinite amount of time is basically being stuck in a void. After all the opportunities and activities available to us are exhaustive after a point too.
We are haunted by this desire to posses it all. Being content is almost impossible. There is this constant feeling of boredom that grips us and we look forward to having the missing element in our lives, instead of enjoying the present one. And the only time we are relieved of this constant sense of incomplete gratification is our death. Funny isn’t it?
