SATISFACTION NOT GUARANTEED
During the last cool rains of April, I bought a used BMW. For the previous seven years I had been driving a 2014 Chevy Spark, a bottom-of-the-line squat runabout, easy to park and perfectly reliable. We called it the “Half-A-Car” and it paid me back far more than its $5,000 price tag. But truth be told, its lack of legroom left my knees in my chest; as I approached 70 I found myself having to stretch for a minute after even a drive to the grocery store. So I looked around for cars better designed for my old bones and 35-inch inseam, and found a seven-year-old BMW plug-in hybrid. Annie’s grandson Jax got the Half-A-Car.
Trying out my new fancy toy, I headed down from our home in Marin County to an appearance in San Diego, six-plus hours in a luxurious, smooth ride. The car drove beautifully, my legs were stretched out, the stereo boomed, and I got to play with all the boy-gadgets that BMWs supply. On the return drive home, the temperature in the Central Valley of California inched up above 72. I turned on the air conditioning.
Warm air.
It turns out that BMW on that model had switched to a freon substitute that had a habit of corroding the inside of the air conditioner condenser until it fell apart and leaked out all the fluid. The repair cost? North of $7,000.
Fortunately, the car had come with a 90-day warranty. When I took it in the following Monday, the service department said the repair was probably covered. It might take 72 hours to find the problem, they said, after which the repair could be done within a few days after that. I figured I’d get my car back in a week.
Six weeks, fourteen lies, and constant blame-shifting later, my car still awaited the repair. When it was delivered at the start of the eighth week, I discovered that they hadn’t completed the repairs. Once my threats hit home, the dealer bought back my car.
The $5,000 Chevy Spark? Never in the shop more than a day. The $23,000 BMW 530e? In the shop seven out of the nine weeks I owned it.
The higher we strive, the more dissatisfaction we encounter. It’s true in everything.
The great songwriter Mose Allison mumbles in my head:
I can’t believe the things I’m seeing
I wonder ‘bout some things I’ve heard
Everybody’s crying mercy
When they don’t know the meaning of the word
Everybody’s complaining, all the time. Today or next month just about everyone I know will mention they’ve been grumpy, cranky, sad or just pissed off at something at least some of the time. It might be politics or family or traffic or the weather. As if we’re all farmers, I’m supposed to be happy that the rains came to California on time this year, but they brought a thriving lawn of grass that I now have to mow. Crap. A drought deserves my concern, right? But having to mow makes me unhappy, too.
Let’s start with the obvious. Being dissatisfied means things didn’t go the way I want. Hmmm. The way I want. Maybe that’s the part I need to understand first.
Wanting things is natural and relentless for us humans with our pleasure principle and our conscious way of picking objects and concepts out of the field to play with. I want a bicycle for Christmas. I want you. I want to be happy. I want a new car. I want gravy on my potatoes, please. I want this or that. Some parents and religions say it’s bad to want too much, but they’re mistaking “I want” for “I expect to get.”
When I want, I’m just being curious. Curiosity and wanting are the same thing. Watch a mother and daughter in a clothes store, going through the racks. Over and over they pull a skirt or blouse out to inspect it. That’s curiosity. When they say, “cute,” it means they want it. But maybe they just walked into the store to look, not buy. They had no expectation of getting, so they just participated in open-ended wanting.
We’re designed to be curious, to pick things to play with, consume, watch, ride, explore, touch, puzzle out, join together, take apart, and in general do something with.
Every thought, project, sentence, action, plan, or activity I engage begins with curiosity, the act of wanting and bringing close. We are relentless and compulsive in our wanting, our being curious. There’s nothing wrong with that. If I objected to wanting, it would be the same as wishing I lacked touch, sight, mind, feeling.
When I switch from wanting to getting, things go to shit. I’m always stuck with a lot of unintended consequences. If it’s a car, maintenance and payments, breakdowns and recalls. The fancier the car, the more likely all of the above. If it’s an ice cream cone, calories and diabetes. If it’s a tropical vacation, rain. If it’s a partner, betrayal. No, not always, but one way or another nothing achieved or possessed arrives completely as expected. We rely on our extraordinary powers of adaptation to adjust to the consequences we inflict on ourselves. Twice in my life I ended up on food stamps. Twice in my life I was wealthier than I could have imagined. I’ve been poor and happy, and rich and unhappy.
I don’t restrain my curiosity any more than I curb my breathing. Wanting to be intimate with things and concepts is the human condition as much as sensing danger is. Other words for wanting are fascination, relating, and love.
So disappointment is not a necessary component of wanting. Sometimes it arrives, as when the object of curiosity turns out to be less interesting than I thought, but more often I’m satisfied just to momentarily touch on the thing that attracted me. The first taste of the ice cream cone, the one before it drips on my shorts, is usually the best. Disappointment may be required, though, when I switch from wanting to expecting to get and keep. The more I want to keep licking the ice cream, the more resentful I will be when all that’s left is cone.
What was the phrase we were torturing here? Things not going the way I want. The way I want. Now we have a completely different activity than being curious, or wanting. When I add “the way” to “I want,” my mind has constructed a framework that is supposed to go one way, as if I was the big guy in control. And if things don’t go right? It’s as if the train I’m engineering has jumped the track. What track? Where did that framework come from?
Surely not nature.
That’s right folks, true nature, the feral woods and wide universe, expresses no morality or improved direction. Nature just happens, neatly and completely, as if in an ongoing present without looking back or ahead. Whoa, a roller coaster that never stops. And never jumps the track. Hang on!
The framework of wanting things to go a certain way is oddly unnecessary, and peculiarly a trap of our own making, us civilized humans. Dogs don’t want things out of curiosity, or a creative urge to make things better. They react to environmental triggers without what we call rational thought, through simple associations of pain and pleasure that are immediate and lack memory or prediction.
We’ve been humans with the same size brains for 300,000 years. We’ve had language for about 100,000 years. It was only 10,000 years ago that civilization started up – probably the result of deciding to store food, whose unintended consequences included overpopulation, hierarchies, complicated moral codes, a massive influx of artisans and possessions, and all the busyness of maintaining a life whose interests could stretch far beyond food, shelter, and clothing. Good for the species, which encourages overpopulation, bad for all of us living in the paranoia of civilization.
It used to be simple: Go out and get your food for the day, repair a couple of palm frond roof tiles, and then loll with your family and friends in your jungle or veldt clearing. There was no better. No worse, either, except the occasional natural disaster: a flood, a fall from a tree, a toxic parasite, a large mammal with big teeth.
To the 300,000 years of humans who preceded us, who were just as smart and curious, we civilized humans lead unbelievably complicated lives. The world each hunter-gatherer human was born into didn’t change during their lifetime in habits, dangers, possessions, or activities. As civilized people we expect frequent change, and we constantly keep our eyes sharp for something better. We want more or different than what we have. We seem to be primarily motivated by dissatisfaction. Why? Because everything in our culture, including our parents and friends, tells us that’s how the wheels go round and round. Sociologists remind us daily that the next generation’s expectations for a better life are being dashed by the rise of the hoarding class or the influx of refugees or the warming climate or the loss of manufacturing or one of a thousand evil forces. Excuse me. Why exactly do I need to be better off than my parents, or even enjoy as high a standard of living as they do? Am I sure that standard of living is the end-all measurement for freedom and happiness?
You don’t have to go that far with me. Let me make it a lot easier. Think about your most recent bit of disappointment, just that one. Not getting to see Taylor Swift. Your car throwing a rod. Your mother. Make yourself feel sad thinking about it. Now right now, right at this very moment, if you were to stop reading this page for a moment, you would think it normal to continue to feel sad for a while. But what in the hell does having missed that concert or gone into debt to pay the repair bill or having a mother who doesn’t really get you have to do with your capacity for satisfaction right now?
I can feel satisfied looking out the window for twenty seconds, can’t I? I can notice that missing a concert, going into debt, and resenting my mother are pretty standard disappointments. Which means they happen to lots of people lots of times and are part of normal, not abnormal. But the framework says that I’m sad because things were supposed to go a different way for me. Why should that make me sad? Sometimes things go sideways. As humans we are terrible at predicting the future, but just good enough to have the hubris to believe that our predictions shouldn’t be messed up by the reality of a system that doesn’t actually care what we think, just keeps rolling on. And we’re never encouraged to notice that our true superpower isn’t achievement or betterment. It’s adaptation. You and I both have a 100 percent success rate at adaptation to misfortune.
I couldn’t stop myself, by the way. As soon as the check from the BMW dealer cleared, I was wandering around another BMW showroom and lot, and within a week had my replacement 530e, still used but a few years newer so it had the improved air conditioning unit, less susceptible to corrosion. And I paid for an extended warranty. Knowing things will go wrong, big time, I covered myself. Hell, keeping my new car out of the shop 50 percent of the time will be an improvement. That’s satisfying.