What are people searching for?
What do you think everyone's looking for? What makes people content?
ON THE SURFACE, PEOPLE are looking for all sorts of things to fill them up. Their minds and bodies chase all sorts of stimulus/stimulation. Academics may crave intellectual stimulation. Althletes and celebrities crave physical stimulation. Strippers and therapists may crave emotional stimulation. Other people spend their life chasing certain thoughts and the feelings they trigger like “I’m smart” or “I’m valuable” or “I’m successful” or "I'm on the right track." It’s not always pathological, but very often, it is.
But in the end, there’s something I think they’re all secretly chasing, even if they don’t know it yet. That thing is intimacy. Intimacy isn’t just something you experience between you and another person—it’s bigger than that. It’s something you experience between you and your surroundings, with strangers, with music, and in a big way, with yourself. That kind of universal intimacy calms you in a very meaningful way. In fact, I think it’s the door to meaning (but that’ll take a little more to explain). Universal intimacy is always necessary for contentment and often times sufficient. Without it, you'll always be chasing something to make you complete.
