THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | JULY AUGUST 2024 35 satisfaction is the joy you get from struggling to achieve. You suffer through something for the promise of the reward. But once you get that reward, the satisfaction doesn’t last. In neuroscience terms, this is Mother Nature creating a “hedonic struggle”: As a person makes more money or climbs the career ladder, their expectations and desires also rise. According to Brooks, this evolutionary mechanism prevents humans from simply giving up in life. Mother Nature wants us to keep climbing higher. The problem is it also creates a “satisfaction dilemma,” particularly among overachievers (which describes a sizable percentage of State Department personnel). The more our career treadmill speeds up, said Brooks, the more we want to go faster to reach the next milestone. But the satisfaction we get is fleeting, so we are never actually happier in the process. This is a problem. To find a way to tackle it, Brooks traveled to a small town high in the Himalayas to ask an expert. “Every year as part of my work with Harvard, I go see the Dalai Lama. So I went to Dharamsala, and I asked him what’s the secret to lasting satisfaction.” The answer had a lot to do with downsizing our desires and expectations. “He said,” Brooks recounted, “that you need to want what you have, as opposed to having what you want. You need to manage your wants.” In other words, less is more, and gratitude is everything. What Does “Meaning” Even Mean? The third piece of the puzzle is meaning, the most complex piece. But it is one that can be boiled down into two basic questions, says Brooks: Why am I alive? For what would I be willing to give up my life right on this day? “These are not easy questions,” said Brooks. But answering them is critical to giving us humans a higher sense of purpose, one that revolves around an idea that most department employees are quite familiar with: the call to service. In fact, Brooks speculated that most of us in diplomacy are not short of a sense of purpose in our work. We understand our value as public servants committed to making the world a better, safer place.
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