Satisfaction: something we generally categorise as a feeling. Is this rightfully so? It is something widely understood as a feeling we experience as a product of achievement. But are we ever really satisfied? Even if we reach our planned goals? We aim to learn whilst young, in both academic and personal matters. We can obtain qualifications, yet never fulfil our full potential. We can spend years involved with people, of both sexes if need be, love and relationships, yet still, winding up in a state of unhappiness remains a possibility. Although we aim high, we may still strike low.

If satisfaction is sought, we believe, conceptually, that our degree of satisfaction could be maximised by experience. But do we ever learn and adapt appropriately? Do our mistakes mean we are credited or debited later in life? A concept is defined as something which is not really real. It has no habitat for existence, except as a visualisation, a piece of knowledge of the imagination. It cannot be pinpointed, yet what it is constituted of can be described in detail, have chapters written on its exact contents and their profound meaning. Is satisfaction ever actually achieved? Honestly? Whilst life is demanding, on all fronts, public and private, academic and personal, do we just struggle to meet expectations of others and ourselves? If satisfaction is not met or felt, fulfilled or shown; do we respond with cynicism towards expectations due to a lack of certainty or understanding with regard to what the hell the point of our lives has become; or how the hell we use it productively to get the most from the 70 odd years we are given? (Or less, if you’re a smoker/live in a city/have a bad diet/bad mental health/genetic health risks.) If you too, have at some point, also asked yourself out loud “what the hell am I doing here” whether it was on the way into the office, in a cramped city, going into a lecture of a course you knew you didn’t want to do, being fired, divorced (or married), then chances are you fit into one or more if the above categories; probably due to your place of work, type of work, and subsequently your continuous search for some form of satisfaction; be it consciously or subconsciously. That would depend on whether you were a child of denial, which is another issue all together.

Anyway, if so, then cynicism is a product of disappointment. Disappointment is most definitely a feeling; whether self-inflicted due to not meeting our own expectations; or vested in us by our not meeting the expectations of others. So; there lays the question of expectations. What are they? Fact? Or fiction? Depending on your answer to previous questions I asked a minute ago, you will answer differently. If you care what other people think, then “Fact” I hear you mentally cry. If not, then “Fiction; who gives a shit about this fucking bollocks anyway?” If the latter, then satisfaction, it seems, is a concept, that alters from person to person. Do you care of you meet your own expectations? Yes? Then surely it is a perfect feeling, one of gratitude twinned with subtle smugness. No? Then you’re probably just a cynical bugger, who is now mentally arguing that you are ‘living realistically.’ A cynic, of course. You’re clearly fuelled by the resentment of the disappointment at all the unmet expectations of yourself you made years ago; and just remembered you had.