The Truth About Why Nothing Satisfies You
Good gifts disappear from view once we expect them. Israel's manna shows how it happens, and a few strange questions help us see again.
By Tim Barber··Video·Updated
Nothing satisfies you for long because good things become familiar, and familiar things stop feeling like gifts. Once you expect something, having it feels normal and losing it feels like theft. Getting more rarely repairs that, because the new thing becomes familiar too. What helps is a practice of paying attention: asking specific, sometimes strange questions about ordinary things until you can see them as grace again. Israel learned this the hard way with manna. I'm learning it in a Target parking lot.
A few days ago I pulled into Target, tapped a button on my phone, and a few minutes later someone loaded a week of groceries into my trunk. What bothered me was how normal it felt. For most of history, people have worried about finding enough food. I ordered mine from a parking space and spent the wait thinking about where I had to drive next.
Why do good things stop feeling good?
In Exodus 16, Israel is in the wilderness with nothing to eat. One morning a fine, flaky substance covers the ground, and they ask each other, "What is it?" Exodus connects the name manna to that question. At first the gift is strange. They have to notice it, gather it, and work out what to do with it. Later in the wilderness, the curiosity is gone.
But now our strength is dried up, and there is nothing at all but this manna to look at.
Numbers 11:6
I used to wonder how anyone gets tired of bread from heaven. Then I look in my own pantry. A bottle of vanilla sits next to my baking soda, and I almost never think about it. Vanilla comes from an orchid. Where most commercial vanilla is grown, each flower has to be pollinated by hand, because the plant is growing far from the insects that would normally do the job. The pods then cure for months before they taste like vanilla. All that work ends in a little bottle, and we use the word "vanilla" to mean boring.
The manna Israel complained about was every bit as remarkable as the manna they first wondered at. What changed was how familiar it had become, and familiarity can make a gift almost invisible.
What is the difference between gratitude and expectation?
This distinction has helped me more than any other. Gratitude sees something good and receives it as a gift. Desire reaches toward something good that hasn't arrived yet. Expectation assumes the good thing will be there.
Expectation does something strange to us. When the expected thing shows up, we feel okay, because it only met the bar. When it fails to show up, we feel robbed. So the gift turns into the minimum requirement for a normal day. Hot water that comes out of the wall at the turn of a handle is a wonder, but I mostly notice it when it's slow.
Desire works the other way. If I want something and receive it as a gift, I'm glad. If it never comes, I'm about where I would have been anyway. That helps me understand Israel. The manna had moved out of the gift column and into the expectation column, and from there it could only disappoint them.
Why doesn't getting more make me happier?
Psychologists call part of this hedonic adaptation. In plain terms, our feelings drift back toward whatever has become normal. A classic study from 1978 compared a small group of lottery winners with people from the same neighborhoods who hadn't won. You would expect the winners to be much happier. They weren't, in any clear way. They also rated ordinary pleasures, like talking with a friend or eating breakfast, as less enjoyable than their neighbors did. The study was small, and it doesn't prove every good change fades on the same schedule. Still, most of us know the pattern. The new car becomes the car, and then the car payment. The house you prayed for becomes the house with gutters to clean.
Jesus saw this appetite clearly. When a man asks him to make his brother split an inheritance, Jesus warns the crowd that "one's life does not consist in the abundance of his possessions" (Luke 12:15). I catch myself trying to fix a problem of attention by buying something. Sometimes the new thing is useful or beautiful, and there's no virtue in pretending otherwise. It still can't teach me to see what's already in front of me.
Can you actually learn to be content?
The manna came with a rhythm. Israel gathered it every morning, and it rotted if they tried to keep it overnight, with one exception before the Sabbath. Gathering every day meant depending on God every day. Then Paul says something I find very hopeful:
I know how to be brought low, and I know how to abound. In any and every circumstance, I have learned the secret of facing plenty and hunger, abundance and need.
Philippians 4:12
Paul learned contentment, which means you and I can learn it too. And look at what he had to learn it for: plenty as well as hunger. Having a lot takes training too. For people like me, with groceries loaded into the trunk for us, that may be the harder half of the lesson.
What questions help you notice what you already have?
The most useful practice I've found is asking myself specific questions that make me look again. One of mine is admittedly strange: what would this exact moment look like if I had no arms? If I ask it while I'm holding a cup of coffee, suddenly I notice the cup, its warmth and its weight. If I ask it while my daughter is hugging me, I feel the hug differently. Picturing something gone for a moment helps me see that it's here.
Other questions work too:
- How did this get here? A plant takes dirt, water, and light and makes a coffee cherry, and the seed inside becomes the bean you grind in the morning, after passing through more hands than you will ever meet.
- What am I doing right now that I once prayed I'd get to do?
- How would this look to someone living 200 years ago? My phone holds a photo of a place we went camping. That alone would have astonished them.
These questions have one job. They get me to pay attention to things that might as well have been cardboard cutouts in the room. "Taste and see that the LORD is good," says Psalm 34:8, and you can't taste or see anything unless you're present.
So here's what I'd ask you to try this week. Once a day, pick one completely ordinary thing: your coffee, the hot water, the person at the next desk, the glass in your windows. Ask one good question about it. Then stay silent long enough to hear an answer.
Israel met the manna with curiosity before they met it with complaints. I suspect that's part of what happened to me. The gifts stayed. I stopped asking questions about them.
In the video I walk through more of these questions and the whole manna story. And if this is touching something deeper in how you see God, you don't have to guess at what's gotten tangled. The quiz names the specific lie in about two minutes: theoverlap.life/quiz
Transcript
[0:00] A few days ago, I pulled into a Target parking lot and tapped a button on my phone. A few moments later, someone brought out a week's worth of groceries and loaded them into my trunk. I barely had to do anything. And it felt completely disconcertingly normal. I think that was the part that bothered me. Human beings have spent most of history worrying about whether they could find enough food. I can order mine from a parking space, and I was mostly thinking about where I needed to drive to next. There's a story in Numbers11 where Israel has food appear for them every single morning, and eventually they're tired of it. I used to find that story a little hard to understand because the circumstances seemed so miraculous. I don't think I'm confused anymore. I want to take a look today at why good things become ordinary so
[0:51] quickly, why getting more rarely fixes that, and one very practical way I have found to begin paying attention to the goodness of God in the gifts that he gives again. Now, the manna story begins in Exodus16. Israel is in the wilderness, they need food, and in the morning there is this fine substance on the ground. They look at it and ask, what is it? Which literally in Hebrew is manna or manna. Exodus connects that question with the name manna. And at first it's strange. It has to be noticed, gathered, learned, figured out. And by the time we get to Numbers11, They're tired of it. They say there's nothing at all but this freaking manna to look at. In Numbers21, they call it miserable or worthless food, depending on your translation.
[1:40] I have at times read passages and thought, how do you get tired of that? That's amazing. bread is literally raining from the heavens. And then I look at my own life. I have vanilla in my pantry. And I barely think about it. Vanilla comes from an orchid. In much of the world where commercial vanilla is grown, each flower has to be pollinated by hand because the plant is being grown outside the range of its native pollinators. The harvested pods then go through months of careful curing before they smell and taste like the vanilla that we know. That whole chain of work ends with a little bottle sitting next to my baking soda, and most of the time we treat it as if it's completely unremarkable. In fact, we treat the word vanilla as if it describes something boring. In years past, it would have been the province of only royalty.
[2:30] The same is true of clean water coming out of the wall. I can make it hot by turning a handle. I can be annoyed when it takes time. Or if it's if it's down for a day or two, it's this massive annoyance. This is where gratitude, desire, and expectation begin to separate. Gratitude sees something good and receives it as a gift. Desire reaches towards something good that is still ahead. Expectation assumes that the good thing will be there. Now, expectation has a really weird effect on us. When the thing arrives, we are simply okay. It met the expectation, right? When it does not arrive, we feel that something has been taken from us. The expected gift becomes the minimum requirement for a normal day. But if we desire something and we receive it as a gift, we're grateful.
[3:21] There's something different. We're happy, and if we don't receive it, we're okay, at the same level that we would be if we only receive what we expect. That helps me understand Israel. The manna had not stopped being remarkable, it had become familiar. Familiarity is a good part of life, but it can make a gift almost invisible. Now, psychologists often describe this with the term hedonic adaptation. Our circumstances change, sometimes dramatically, and over time our emotional lives tend to just adjust toward what now feels normal. A classic1978 study compared a small group of lottery winners with people from the same neighborhoods who had not won. The winners didn't report a clear overall happiness advantage. They also rated ordinary pleasures, things like, you know, just talking with a friend or eating breakfast, as less enjoyable than the comparison group did. Now that study has limits.
[4:11] It was small, and it doesn't prove that every good change wears off in the same way or on the same schedule, but it does put language around something that I think most of us recognize. The new car eventually just becomes the car, and maybe even the car payment. The house that we hoped for becomes ah, it's the house with a gutter that needs cleaning or a lawn that needs mowing. Something can remain genuinely good and in fact incredible. Something that other people would pray for, maybe something that you did pray for. But it's, you know, our awareness of its goodness fades because it becomes familiar. Ecclesiastes1.8 says that the eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing. And Proverbs2720 says that the eyes of a person are never satisfied. Scripture seems to take this restless appetite pretty seriously. It does not assume that another possession,
[5:01] achievement, or experience will finally settle it. In fact, Jesus says that life does not consist in the abundance of possessions, and I think he might have been on to something. I think that is pretty important. I think that matters. I often try to solve a problem of attention by getting something new. Sometimes the new thing is useful or beautiful and there's no virtue in pretending otherwise. It still cannot teach me how to see what is already in front of me for how good and how beautiful it is. So the question becomes can gratitude be practiced? Can I interrupt adaptation long enough to see an ordinary good thing again? The manna story suggests that I can, and it begins with receiving life one day at a time. By the way, if any of this is hitting close to home, there's a good chance that one specific lie about God is quietly running the show in your mind.
[5:49] I built a two-minute quiz to help you name it. The quiz sorts your results into one of five patterns I see most often in the people who are trying to follow Jesus but running into something that's keeping them down. And I've got all kinds of free resources on the other side. If you take it and it's helpful to you, they're all yours. It's in one of the first links in the description, or you can just go to the overlap.life slash quiz and take it there. Can't wait to see what you get. Now, one of the things that I think can really change this whole process for you, there's a really simple practice. And it's just about asking yourself better questions. In Exodus16, Israel is told to gather the manna each morning. Most of it cannot be stored overnight. When people try, it spoils. It goes rotten. There is an exception before the Sabbath, which is worth noticing, but the usual rhythm is daily gathering and daily dependence on God and his provision.
[6:40] Now that rhythm appears again in the Lord's Prayer. Give us this day our daily bread. The prayer brings our attention back to today's provision. Paul also says in Philippians4 that contentment is something that he learned or was initiated into. It means that contentment is something we can learn. It's something that we can practice, get better at. And the most useful practice I have found for maintaining gratitude and sort of reenchanting myself almost with that which is good and beautiful in my life is just asking myself specific questions. I mean specific questions that make me look again. One of mine is admittedly a little strange, but what would this exact moment look like if I had no arms? If I ask that while I'm holding a cup of coffee, suddenly I notice the cup.
[7:27] I notice the warmth and the weight of it. If I ask it while my daughter is hugging me, I become aware of the hug in a different way. The question helps me to imagine the absence of something long enough to recognize its presence, so that I don't take my own arms that function and have hands at the end of them for granted again. Others call this negative visualization. The point is to imagine losing something that you value briefly and intentionally, so familiarity would not erase your appreciation of it, and you just come to expect it as something taken for granted. Other questions can work too. Like, how did this get here? Here I have a water bottle with all kinds of stickers on it. This is a pretty remarkable thing that was engineered for me, isn't it? I couldn't make this by myself. Doesn't really matter how much time you give me, I'm not going to be able to manufacture a bottle. Or the computer that I'm using to record this video on.
[8:17] Such an unbelievably complicated symphony of things had to take place in order to bring me a machine by which I can record videos. There's more to it than just the computer itself, too. There's other monitors. There's this camera, there's a microphone just off the frame right here that captures my voice. Then there's internet that I use that's wired into this house that has air conditioning. And all of a sudden I'm looking around myself and I'm seeing all sorts of incredible blessings, and I'm connected with how in the world is it that these things landed on my doorstep? How is it that I have a doorstep in the first place? How is it that these things exist in my space for me to be able to utilize them? Another really good example is coffee. Think about all of the hands that are touching the product in the process of producing the cup of coffee that you drink in the morning. And think about how insane it is that photosynthesis takes dirt and water and
[9:09] light and runs it through a plant to produce a coffee cherry, which inside has a coffee seed that turns into the beans that you and I grind and make into a cup of coffee in the morning. How insane is that? If you ask that about the vanilla again, you find an orchid, flowers that are commonly pollinated by hand in commercial production, pods harvested months later, and a long curing process before the familiar flavor develops. Other questions. Like, what am I doing right now that I once prayed I would get to do? What can I notice with my senses right now? How would this ordinary thing have looked to someone living200 years ago? Like this, my phone. And look at that. That's a place we went to go camping. How unbelievable is this? These questions, it's really important to note, are not intended to sort of gin up or manufacture gratitude.
[10:01] What they're intended to do is to help me pay attention, to look at things that otherwise may as well be cardboard cutouts in my environment. Psalm34 says, Taste and see that the Lord is good. Tasting and seeing both require my presence. And a good question can bring me back to the present moment in a way that I don't really think many other things can. So I have something I want you to try this week. Once a day, choose one totally ordinary thing and ask one really good question about it. Ask it about your coffee or your car, hot water, your work, the person sitting across from you or n sitting next to you at work in the cubicle, or the other person in the maintenance bay, the people who you know replace your tires, the streetlight, the sidewalk, your own garden, the glass on your windows, and ask yourself really good questions about it.
[10:49] You can feel free to borrow one of mine. What would this moment look like if I had no arms? How did this get here? What am I doing right now that I once prayed for the opportunity to do? And then stop quietly, silently, even long enough to receive an answer. Exodus says that when Israel first saw the manna, they ex they asked, What is it? The text connects that question with the name manna. That's what it is. Love that detail. Their first response to the gift was curiosity, even if by Numbers eleven the question was gone, and the manna had become something that they were tired of seeing. I suspect that is part of what's happened to me. The gifts have remained. I've stopped asking questions about them. But before you go, go find out which lie about God is secretly shaping your faith. The quiz takes about two minutes. The link is right below or at the overlap.life slash quiz. Next Friday, I want to talk about
[11:39] what happens when disappointment with God begins to feel like God owes us something. If you want to follow the series, subscribing is the easiest way to catch the next one. I'm really grateful that you're here. Further up and further in.
Tagsgratitudecontentmentmannahedonic adaptationdaily bread
