Satisfaction!

November 14th, 2020| Topic: RaMbLeS | 0

This may not be much of a surprise, but more Americans are dissatisfied with life in general than at any time in the last five decades! So said the COVID Response Tracking Study a few months ago, conducted by the University of Chicago: only 14 percent of Americans say they’re very happy, down from 31 percent who in 2018.

The public is less optimistic today about the standard of living improving for the next generation than it has been in the past 25 years. What with shutdowns and lockdowns, twice as many Americans report being lonely today as in 2018.

COVID and riots and elections notwithstanding, there seems to be some hardwiring about happiness. So declared the authors of “Genetic Variants Associated with Subjective Well-Being, Depressive Symptoms, and Neuroticism Identified Through Genome-Wide Analyses,” in Nature Medicine a few years ago. This was a massive study of around 300,000 folks looking at their genes and satisfaction/positive affect.

Our findings—3 loci associated with subjective well-being, 2 loci associated with depressive symptoms, and 11 loci associated with neuroticism—support the view that GWAS can successfully identify genetic associations with highly polygenic phenotypes in sufficiently large samples.”

Another article from The Journal of Happiness Studies—yes, there is such a publication!—agreed:

Findings from such studies of overall happiness measures … are fairly consistent, with genetic influences commonly found to account for approximately 20–50 % of the total variation.”

So it’s probably both nature and nurture that are involved in satisfaction.

But while inheritance of sunny dispositions (nature) helps, as also does life’s circumstances (nurture), one must never forget that God is the ultimate source of satisfaction.

Here’s the psalmist lamenting his unsatisfactory situation to God:

Work wonders of Your lovingkindness,
You who deliver those taking refuge
from those who rise up, by Your right hand.
… In the shadow of Your wings hide me
from the face of the wicked who assault me—
my deadly enemies around me.
They have closed their guts;
their mouth, it has spoken arrogantly.
… They set their eyes to stretch [us] out on the ground.
He is like a lion eager to rend in pieces,
and as a young lion crouching in hiding.
Arise, Yahweh, be in front of his face, bring him to his knees;
save my soul from the wicked with Your sword,
from mortals, by Your hand, Lord.
Psalm 17:7–14a

This psalm, by the way, mentions a lot of body parts, those of the psalmist, those of the enemies (here), and those of God. And notice how this section, dealing with enemies and their malevolent activities, is bookended by God’s hand, standing for his power. At either end of Ps 17:7–14, God’s hand encloses, shuts off, and literarily distances these nefarious elements from the psalmist (whose body parts—lips, heart, mouth, and feet—showed up in 17:1–6). Only God can separate and bracket out evil and enemies from the people of God.

And the result?

But Your treasured one[s]—You fill their belly;
they are satisfied with children,
and leave their surplus to their babies.
I—in rightness I shall behold Your face;
I will be satisfied, when I awake, with Your likeness.
Psalm 17:14b–15

Only God satisfies. Indeed, while the psalmist’s body shows up in the first part of the psalm, and the enemies’ organs in the second, only God’s “body” appears all throughout the psalm. His presence = satisfaction for his people. No wonder the psalmist can awake after a turbulent night, satisfied with God’s “likeness” or “form”—his “body.”

SOURCES:
The New York Post; Nature Genetics; Journal of Happiness Studies