We treat satisfaction like a finish line — permanent, polished, waiting for us if we hustle hard enough and heal “right”. And yet, what if that’s the wrong map? What if satisfaction isn’t a destination at all — rather, a weather pattern: passing through, beautiful when it visits, impossible to domesticate?

What if the baseline isn’t seamless fulfillment?

Psychoanalysts called it jouissance: those bright, disorienting flashes of more-than-pleasure that visit and vanish. We get moments, not permanence. Yet we keep trying to retrofit life into a continuous high: more goals, more apps, more “optimised mornings”, more distractions polished to look like purpose. We stack our calendars like sandbags against an inner tide we don’t want to feel.

And then something tears through the fabric. The diagnosis. The layoff. The quiet Tuesday you crumble for no obvious reason. The void you’ve been outrunning steps into the doorway, and the light goes strange. It feels like descent — like a cold, locked crypt — but it’s also a threshold. The ache isn’t evidence that you’re failing at life. It’s evidence that you’re alive.

We’re not built for perpetual plenitude. Every wisdom tradition has said this in its own dialect: dukkha, exile, the wound that opens the heart. Jung mapped it as shadow and descent. Lacan called it lack. Mystics describe a dark night where the old scaffolding collapses so something truer can breathe. Different names, same contour: there’s a gap at the core of things. We suffer when we try to plaster over it. We grow when we learn to relate to it.

So here’s the unsettling invitation: stop trying to seal the crack. Sit beside it. Let the draft move through you without rushing to fix the windows. Notice how much of your life is designed to outrun this exact feeling – the tabs, the tasks, the tiny screens that promise relief but deliver numbness. Notice the bargains you make with yourself: “When I get there, I’ll finally feel whole”. There is no there. There is only here, and the momentary sweetness that visits like birds at dusk.

This isn’t a call to resignation; it’s a call to intimacy. To meet the void is to meet yourself without costume. It’s to put down the role of the one-who-has-it-together and become the one-who-is-honest. It’s to trade the anesthesia of certainty for the medicine of contact. Paradoxically, that’s where steadiness lives — inside the willingness to feel the wobble.

Look around: when we refuse the ache, we outsource it. We build cultures that run on distraction, economies that monetise our longing, feeds that flood the cavity with glitter until we forget it’s there. The collective chaos is the echo of a shared refusal. We think we’re avoiding darkness; we’re manufacturing it at scale.

What shifts when we stop? When we let the void speak in plain language?

Sometimes it says: Rest. Sometimes: Tell the truth. Sometimes: Cry. Sometimes it says nothing at all, and you learn to sit with silence without turning it into a problem to solve. You breathe in the unfinishedness and, somehow, it stops feeling like a threat and starts feeling like a horizon.

Practically, this looks smaller than your ego wants. It’s making hot chocolate and tasting it. It’s putting your phone in another room and letting loneliness introduce itself by its real name: longing. It’s prayer without performance. It’s a page in a journal that doesn’t have to be profound. It’s a walk where you practice being a body, not a brand. It’s telling a friend, “I don’t need advice; I need witness.” It’s letting satisfaction be an unexpected guest, not a lease you’re trying to secure.

And when the next tear comes — as it will — you’ll recognise the terrain. You’ll know that the crypt has a back door, that the darkness is not empty but full of seeds. You’ll remember that you don’t climb out by force; you grow out by contact. The more you befriend the gap, the less power it has to terrify you. Not because it disappears, but because you do not abandon yourself inside it.

Maybe this is the quiet revolution: to stop demanding wholeness behave like a product, and start letting it behave like a rhythm. To become someone who can hold sweetness without gripping and hold sorrow without drowning. To build a life that isn’t a fortress against pain but a hearth that can host it.

You don’t have to wake the whole world up. You don’t have to prove you’ve “healed”. You don’t have to turn your ache into content. You just have to strike one small match in the dark room of your own life and look honestly at what’s there. The flame won’t seal the crack. It will make it visible. And in that light, you might find a needle and thread.

Not to stitch the world shut — but to stitch yourself to it. To the gap, to the gust, to the gorgeous, fleeting weather of being here.