For a good while, I have been thinking about the word “satisfaction.” Google defines it as “fulfillment of one’s wishes, expectations, or needs.” In one sense it reflects our need to feel that our actions, needs, and goals align with some form of fulfillment. Or maybe some form of contentment in your life.

Journalist Arthur Brooks wrote about “satisfaction” in an article he wrote in the Atlantic Magazine back in 2022. He aptly titled the article, “How to Want Less.”

In the article, Brooks reveals a real problem with human satisfaction. He says that as we wind our way through life, satisfaction that comes from fulfilling our wishes and expectations, quickly fades. Brooks says, “No matter what we achieve, see, acquire, or do, it seems to slip from our grasp.”

He truly believes that finding satisfaction is the greatest paradox of human life. For we crave it, we believe we can get it, we get a glimpse of it, and maybe even experience it for a brief moment, and then it vanishes. However, we never give up on our quest to get and hold on to it. Brooks then quotes Mick Jagger’s famous line, “I try, and I try, and I try, and I try, but I can’t get no satisfaction.” What Jagger is really saying is I can’t keep no satisfaction.

Though each of us have different dreams, the trap is the same. We believe our dreams will deliver promises of sweet lasting satisfaction; money, recognition, pleasure, and relationships. However, whatever we experience in this life, it provides no lasting satisfaction.

I have two thoughts on this. First, I believe that there is one thing that can grow in richness over time and that is love relationships. Love can grow over time if the relationship is properly nurtured. The problem is that so many relationships, particularly marriage relationships don’t grow. In fact, so many of them wither and end in divorce.

I just looked up the current divorce rate in the United States. For first marriages it is 45%. The divorce rate for second marriages is 65%, and a third marriage has over a 70% chance of divorce. From my perspective, marriage is wonderful but hard, yet it clearly has the potential to contribute to a satisfying life.

In all that I have read about the issue of finding satisfaction, not many people see it as a spiritual issue. Have you considered that maybe this desire for satisfaction is a deep yearning of the soul? The Bible refers to it as a hunger or thirst of the soul. In John 6:35 Jesus says, “I am the bread of life; he who comes to Me will not hunger and he who believes in Me will never thirst.”

I think this blog can be summarized from a powerful verse in Jeremiah 2:13. God tells us: “For my people have committed two evils, they have forsaken Me, the fountain of living waters, to make for themselves cisterns, broken cisterns that can hold no water.”

God is revealing here that we as humans struggle so much in life because we forsake the fountain of living water and in the process pursue the things of this world and construct a strategy for our lives that we hope will satisfy our longings. However, when we do this we have actually constructed vessels that are broken and can hold no water. This in turn leaves us continually thirsty, continually searching, continually longing and we don’t know why our thirst is never satisfied.

Richard E Simmons III is the founder and Executive Director of The Center for Executive Leadership and a best-selling author.