Think back to one of the most miserable experiences in your life, a time when you felt like a failure or experienced a tragedy. Try to re-experience what you felt. Would experiencing any physical pleasure have transformed your mood? Would the most delicious food have made you feel better? Of course not. You could hardly enjoy anything. Because of your extreme pain, physical pleasure lost its pizzazz, and you didn’t care too much about it.
Though the yetzer hara tries to convince us otherwise, physical pleasure just cannot satisfy the feeling that something is missing. We must address the feeling that life is empty, but physical pleasure is not the way to do it. Neither is cheap emotional pleasure such as impressing others with something insignificant. Like any quick fix, these pleasures will not satisfy you, and they will certainly not make you excited about life. What do we really miss out on by not chasing them? We just miss out on being miserable.
Nevertheless, the question remains: how do we deal with the feelings of emptiness that prevent us from being happy? How can we possibly satisfy this inner voice and live a happy, thrilling life when we don’t know what it really wants? Giving in will make us feel guilty and empty, but not giving in will make us feel that we missed out and are left with nothing! How do we avoid feeling that we are in a lose-lose situation?
The solution is to realize what an opportunity our challenges are. We can reach astounding heights that have rarely been attained! If we master this attitude, we will feel accomplished instead of feeling that we missed out. We will buzz with excitement as we taste the sweetness of success. We will confidently admire the strength we exerted with Hashem’s help, and we will be proud of ourselves rather than regretting standing strong against desire. We will be thrilled about coming closer to our lifelong goal of greatness, and we will finally experience some of the emotional pleasure we long for.
Only meaningful accomplishments, especially those done with excitement, can quench the dissatisfaction that “something is missing.” Feelings of dissatisfaction come when we are not happy with ourselves because we are not becoming the people we secretly wish we would become. That is why the only solution is to get on a path of growth and accomplishment that will lead us to fulfill our destiny. A great way to start is by standing up to the yetzer hara when he challenges us with desire. Each little burst of effort is a massive accomplishment, even if we have yet to attain mastery over our desires. These “small” feats are incredibly valuable, and Hashem takes great pride in them!
As we fight against desire, we grow and accomplish at an astronomical rate. Although self-perfection takes a long time, once we begin growing, we will already feel better about where we are headed. Even better, because we will realize that every second is an astronomical accomplishment, we will feel on top of the world! We will not feel inferior to anyone, and we will pulse with excitement! We won’t feel bad for missing out because we will know that we didn’t really miss out on anything.