"You can't always get what you want..."

There was a time, when I was younger and still at home, that I decided to post a "Quote of the Day" on a small dry erase board on the refrigerator in our family's kitchen.  I planned to only use quotations borrowed from rock-n-roll lyrics.  It worked great for about 3 days, then I quickly started losing momentum (or alternatively, there weren't enough inspirational quotes that I could find in the music that I listened to).  I remember the first quote came from a song called, "You can't always get what you want"by the Rolling Stones.  I've never been a huge fan of the Stones (blasphemy, right?!?!) but I always liked this particular song.  The song was named the 100th greatest song of all time by Rolling Stone (no relation to the rock group) magazine.  It was once said that the song was the Stones' response to the Beatles tune, "Hey Jude" (the Beatles used an orchestra in that song). 


There has been a lot of different interpretations of the song's lyrics over the years, but essentially the song addresses the major topics of the 1960's - love, politics, and drugs.  There is certainly a deeper meaning here though.  Mick Jagger is certainly an intellectual (despite his long affiliation with the 1960's culture of sex, drugs, and rock-n-roll!) and actually went to school at the prestigious London School of Economics before becoming a rock star.  Regardless of the deeper cultural meanings in the song, I have always found one of the lines in the chorus to be the most poignant (part of the title comes from the chorus - and this is the line that I used in my "Quote of the Day"):


"You can't always get what you want.  But if you try sometimes.  Well you might find.  You get what you need."


Wow - this might be the greatest rock-n-roll lyric of all time.  It is absolutely packed with lessons on how to approach life, particularly from the Stoic philosophical viewpoint.  Be satisfied with what you have in life, because chances are, it's enough.  I get it - there are people in this world who don't have enough.  That's not who I am talking about.  I am specifically talking to those of us who have led a life of privilege.  One of the tendencies I see today is that many of us are never satisfied with what we have in life.  We aren't satisfied with our job.  Our salary.  Our title.  Our house.  The place we live.  Our friends.  The kind of car we drive.  Whatever it is, it just never seems to be enough.  The Stoics (and Mick Jagger) would tell us that we should be content with what we have.  As the Roman Stoic philosopher, Seneca, once said, “True happiness is to enjoy the present, without anxious dependence upon the future, not to amuse ourselves with either hopes or fears but to rest satisfied with what we have, which is sufficient, for he that is so wants nothing."


So, as Mick Jagger wisely once said, "You can't always get what you want."  But that's completely okay.  Because chances are... "you get what you need."  And that is enough.