It happens every time I press “Buy Now.” A trigger that initiates the never-ending cycle on the Amazon app. It really begins five minutes or five hours before pressing the button. The first step is finding the item that fills the gap in my life. A new kitchen gadget or accessory for my desk pops up in my ads, or I see it in my friends’ lives, and I immediately hit the app to begin researching. I find the perfect intersection of good price and seemingly good quality. Next, I hit “Buy Now.” And then, the waiting game begins. I wait for 24 hours to follow the package on my app all the way to my doorstep. Simultaneously, my mind begins to think that this item, whatever it might be, may fulfill what seems to be causing my lack of pure efficiency working from home or the cleanliness of dishes. Then, I open the box. And a funny feeling sets in. This item is just an item. Yes, it’s useful but the cycle has not ended. It will occur over and over. In fact, it only seems to increase as time progresses. What is this feeling? In a small sense, what I feel is restlessness. A joy that does not subside with a material good and a quick willingness to move on to the next item to be purchased and consumed. This applies not only to Amazon gadgets but also to larger, more substantial decisions and emotions. Restlessness is not an alien feeling to humanity, but, as this work suggests, has been a deeply rooted feeling that many thinkers have attempted to address.
In Why We Are Restless: On the Modern Quest for Contentment, Benjamin and Jenna Silber Storey approach this subject of contentment (or the lack thereof) from a unique angle. The Storeys address the “quest of contentment” through the eyes of four French thinkers: Montaigne, Pascal, Rousseau, and Tocqueville. Through this work, the reader is provided with a map of contentment. A tool to educate the reader of the lay of the land of contentment that has been charted and produced by many thinkers in history’s past. This mere glimpse into the conversation of contentment can only summarize and address four of the finest French thinkers on the topic.
Four Frenchmen on the Quest for Contentment
What Storey and Storey attempt to do in their book is not to provide a “How-to” in overcoming restlessness, but to produce vignettes for helpful historical background to the conversation.
The Storeys begin by looking at the life and work of Montaigne. Living in 1500s France, Montaigne’s approach to the life of restlessness is to find contentment within. Montaigne’s thinking blazes the trail for the Enlightenment in which meaning and contentment come from the self. “Fidelity to oneself is a virtue that any man, in principle, may master. It does not require great brilliance or austerity or daring; it requires only the willingness and determination to match our words to our deeds and our deeds to our words.”[1] Montaigne’s perspective lays to the wayside any sense of remorse or frustration with restlessness and instead uses “diversion” as a tactic to overcome any discontent. Montaigne is convinced nothing will satisfy this restlessness, including government positions, family, or money so he decides that the distractions of these things are to be done away with.
If Montaigne’s main source of release from restlessness was himself, the next thinker the Storeys describe would be marked by faith. Pascal, the great Christian thinker of the 1600s, would lean into his Christian life as the source of his rest from restlessness. This should be unsurprising considering the great influence the works of St. Augustine had on his life and thinking. Storey and Storey write, “Indeed, the quest for immanent contentment leaves the restless human heart more anxious than ever, for modernity’s very success in remaking the world in man’s image allows us to see, with terrifying clarity, that a human life is not the sort of problem a psychological stratagem can solve.”[2] Pascal agrees with Montaigne that a life filled with searching for contentment is completely miserable. Montaigne’s answer was diversion and the focus being placed on the self. Pascal’s response to this misery says it has to be outside the self. Not only the self but also outside this world. To Pascal, only one reasonable answer is possible to fulfill these deep longings for content: God. Pascal, a great mathematician in his own right, would be inclined to look to logical answers to defeating misery, but he points to his Augustinian roots by placing Christ at the epicenter of human contentment.
The Storeys then point to the Enlightenment thinker Jean-Jacques Rousseau of the 1700s. Rousseau’s efforts in the question of contentment are what many would call a “third way.” His solution is to avoid extremism which could look like a life of pure loneliness and abandonment from any outside relationships or to value relationships to the point that you can’t live without them. But this does not come about through success and found contentment. Rather, Rousseau finds himself longing with every failed attempt at finding rest. “Perhaps inadvertently, he teaches us that all of our attempts to overcome our dividedness by living out our modern principles more consistently will fail to reconcile us to ourselves. He systematically demonstrates that neither wholly consistent sociability nor wholly consistent solitude is possible—nor even obviously preferable to the bourgeois dividedness from which we begin.”[3] The life lived towards immanent contentment is merely unsatisfactory as we learn through the life of Rousseau.
In a somewhat surprising turn, Storey and Storey look to Alexis de Tocqueville as their final Frenchman. Tocqueville famously writes Democracy in America where he observes keenly a consumerism that has infiltrated the American mind and culture in which he also recognizes a need for something to bring Americans out of their discontent. In fact, Tocqueville says it not only has infiltrated the individual but the political landscape as well. Tocqueville noticed that politics in America began to serve the American restlessness and meet (and encourage) the need for immanent contentment.
An Ode to FOBO
The conclusion to the book transports the reader back from the 16th through 19th centuries into the 21st. The Storeys reengage the example they began their book with regarding a student deciding whether she should pursue her Juris Doctorate or her PhD. Many would consider this a win-win situation if both are attainable. But the Storeys also dive into the mindset of the modern student and their struggle with FOBO. Many are familiar with the term FOMO (Fear of Missing Out), but a new rising term has come: FOBO, the Fear of Better Options. Although the Storeys do not name this fear, it is clear what is being described. They quote a student of theirs saying “what he dreaded most was ‘spending his chips’: investing all his carefully cultivated potential into any particular course of life, converting a hazy but infinitely promising might be into a definite and limited is.”[4] This newfound fear is crippling to the next generation. Why would I want to put all “my chips” into one path when so many are within my grasp? What if the grass was truly greener on the other side? The quest for contentment is nowhere near being completed. The thinkers of the past have helped us to this point on this quest, but all will need to continue to pursue true rest. True contentment. And we have this true rest and true contentment in Christ Jesus. We must follow in the footsteps of Blaise Pascal and his great influence, St. Augustine, and point to the true rest found in Jesus Christ.
Notes:
[1] Benjamin Storey and Jenna Silber Storey, Why We Are Restless: On the Modern Quest for Contentment (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2022), 27.
[2] Storey and Storey, 52.
[3] Storey and Storey, 139.
[4] Storey and Storey, 176–77.