Sometimes, nothing is ever enough. Just as ‘happiness is a state of mind’, unhappiness or dissatisfaction is too. It’s like a virus: once you catch it, it is contagious and spreads. I myself have been going through a serious dissatisfaction cycle that paints my view in melancholy colors, and leaves me uninspired. This is what I do –maybe you recognize it. Once dissatisfaction takes roots through one subject –say a lost love or an uncertain job situation- you try to erase and/or overcome it by looking for a bigger satisfaction. For example, to ease my blues I go over countless scenarios, including radical hair make-overs, moving to another city, taking a plane to a loved Greek island,  basically anything that is DRASTIC and DRAMATIC will do.

What I forget –and lord knows, avoid- to do is just stay. Just stay, as Pema Chodron calls it, on the hot spot, the uncomfortable, unexciting, painful place. This is probably the last thing you want to do when you catch the dissatisfaction flu, but it’s the only way to beat it. If you don’t, and keep on looking for people and things outside of yourself to fill up the hole that makes you so dissatisfied, you end up in something that the Buddhist cosmology calls the ‘hungry ghost realm’. This is a place that is, as the name suggests, filled with hungry ghosts, often depicted as Munch’s ‘the scream’-like creatures with holes in their mouths and bellies that spill everything they eat, leaving them forever hungry and never satisfied.

This is a scary place. However, it is a place that we all find ourselves in too often. It is one of the most dangerous viruses of the highly individualized, western world, where everything is available (seemingly) and sky is the limit (seemingly). Like the ghosts with holes in our bellies and minds, we need more and bigger things to satisfy us. Once we find our perfect job, we start noticing everything that is wrong with is. Once we’ve found a perfect love, we get bored. Once we land a dream project, we start dreaming of the next. It is never just right, just enough, just fine.

So how do we get out of the hungry ghost realm? By doing the opposite of bigger and more, yes that’s right, by doing smaller and less. Instead of flying off to a deserted island where “happiness will surely lie”, you go down into the level of your potatoes, your breath, the encounter at the supermarket. Appreciation is a muscle that we train in order to be more satisfied. Like dissatisfaction, it is contagious, and when you train your ability to appreciate the small, you won’t need Big Things to sweep you of your feet. So bake a cake. Call a friend and ask them how they are. Frame a picture. Clean your toilet. Catch the late summer sun and feel that it’s just fine.