Compensation and Satisfaction

Hey y’all,

We have two more events planned this season before we take a brief hiatus over the summer. I am truly grateful to all those who’ve contributed to and attended the events during this season. I was just looking back at the previous event calendar over the past two years (we started doing this in January 2023) and we’ve held over 60 events, spanning a wide range of topics: events on Love, Work, to Violence, Perversion, Theology, War, Friendship, as well as two seminars (“Missed Encounters at the End of Achievement” and “Don Quixote”). When I first started the group—I called it Negative Space because I had imagined that our events would be a place to discuss subversive and perhaps contrarian, anti-mainstream themes and ideas, conversations that don’t usually don’t have a place in everyday life, and to discuss these sorts of things in a community. We also had no rules (except for the formal hour rule, where the topic host primarily holds the floor for the first hour), and this meant that nothing was off the table. It still feels this way, that the limits of our conversations are only the ones we encounter in the conversation--which are, in a way, real, negotiated, in flux. What I’ve especially come to enjoy is the associative nature of these events, and the distance traveled in a night, starting in one place, ending in another, etc. Typically I think philosophy is thought of as a field of positive theses and proofs, but something that I think really sets our group apart is the associative dimension of the discussion, how it flowers and blooms into new or seemingly disjointed or unassociated areas of thought, etc.

Anyway, enough of that. I’m hosting the next topic followed by Jenny, who will be hosting a topic on Animal Rights in a few weeks.

The topic for next Monday is titled Compensation and Satisfaction.

I haven’t hosted a topic in a while, I’ve mostly been helping to queue them up on the calendar, and I feel like this one is exceptionally incomplete. Nevertheless, I’ve had these two words stuck in my head for a while now and have been thinking about their relationship. I consider compensation almost categorically as the substitution for satisfaction. Compensation is the compromise or settlement sought when satisfaction is either apparently or actually inhibited. So, instead of getting what we want (satisfaction), we are compensated usually financially or otherwise in exchange for the time, energy, work, or activity committed to a project or engagement that lacks any kind of personally meaningful charge or drive, which does not satisfy. One of the difficulties of satisfaction—or the difficulty of living a satisfying life—involves, however, a whole lot of ambiguity around what it is, of course, we desire—whether that is moment-to-moment, within a season of life, or over one’s lifetime. Right now I desire a very particular kind of drink, but ask me what it is a desire on a larger sense, and I’d still want to answer the question beyond the particular moment even if the answer becomes something more abstract, like, “I desire a satisfying life.” This would of course, bring us down again, moment-to-moment, to the specificities or particulars of it. Of course, I haven't even mentioned yet all the other barriers to satisfaction that are not necessarily latent to satisfaction (and desire). There are also those external barriers and inhibitors we know too well. So even if we knew precisely what it is we want, there are of course all those social and material inhibitors that restrict our capacities for said satisfaction. Additionally, our models of desire—the films we watch, our personal heroes, or even the people we envy on account of what seems like a superior level of satisfaction in life, etc—seem to both aid in the specificity of our desire as well as function as a compensation for the lack of satisfaction (“I cannot have what I want, or I don’t know what I want, however I can enjoy another person getting what they want”). So we might call compensation a certain substitution.

I’m bringing all this up, however, because it has occurred to me over the past few years that perhaps a noble way to live involves, not the giving up of one’s desires, but rather the engagement with, the fulfillment of, and the drilling down on the specificity of one’s desires and move beyond mere compensation toward satisfaction, even though that is no doubt a tumultuous road. I think we should not abandon the cycle of desire and satisfaction (or lack thereof) on account of the troubles we might find there, and settle. I am calling this settlement compensation, as antithetical to following desire, questioning it, specifying it, all in the move toward satisfaction.

Perhaps we can unpack this more on Monday, or perhaps we can chat about the troubling aspects of this view. I’m sure there are many ways to go from here. Any, this is just a brief pre-amble, some of my initial thoughts before Monday.

Best,

Sawyer