Enter the Next Realm to a World of Satisfaction

Wendell Berry not only teaches as a professor at the University of Kentucky, but also farms leisurely. A man who both taught students and tended to plants questioned the meaning of “satisfaction” and answered it in his essay “Home of the Free.”

I believe it is not what people do but what people feel while doing something they love that evokes a sense of “satisfaction.” To me, it’s a warm feeling felt by people doing things passionately, but the exact fuel for it varies from person to person. This is predominantly due to the fact that no two people are the same, interests and what excited people differ. I’ll be elaborating on how, as part of the current tech-savvy generation, I get the best of both worlds feeling fulfilled with and without technology. I will also mention certain cases which involve the people around me.

To Berry, performing manual labor on a scorching day in order to produce short and long term benefits is gratifying. His sense of satisfaction, to me, represents that of a monk, to do work without comfort at the mercy of natural weather, to be tenacious till the breaking point, to work hard and complete the back-breaking task so that he can finally sit down knowing he finished. Although not a Luddite, he drops hints by thinking that since Purdue engineers foresaw that by 2001 everything would be done by remote control “…there probably wouldn’t be much satisfaction in such a world.” He suggests the ‘“efficiency,’ a lot of ‘production’ and ‘consumption’” due to technology is responsible for people’s lack of gratitude. Also, from his choice of examples for advertisements he insinuates that technology is the villain who creates a human hierarchy, a division between people who do what “we ‘hate”’ and those wh...

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...long run. By completing one assignment we feel the short-term satisfaction, but at the same time we know that however small the development, the contribution is crucial for the future we all dream about with androids, machines and more.

I would like to conclude by saying that satisfaction is felt by everyone, but the trigger can be as different as my A+ on a paper to Berry’s manure shoveling. Therefore, there isn’t any hard and fast rule to feeling satisfaction, but when people find what induces this feeling, all else seems void of fulfillment. In case of Berry, his farm is his source of enjoyment so naturally, technology related activities aren’t psychologically rewarding to him. My message to all would be that next time there’s a moment to spare don’t waste it, seize it to do something you are passionate about and savor the sweet satisfaction that comes after.