"You'll never be satisfied with your publications record." I'll never forget my doctoral supervisor telling me that. The year was 1980. I had just arrived in Basel to begin my D.Theol. studies under the great Swedish New Testament scholar Bo Reicke. A month after my arrival in that historic city on the Rhine, I received in the mail the page proofs of my very first journal article. The periodical was the Grace Theological Journal, and the essay was entitled "The Peculiarities of Ephesians and the Ephesian Address." I melted into my shoes when I got those page proofs. I simply couldn't believe that anything of mine would ever be published. But here it was, my first-ever refereed journal article staring me in the face. "Nothing could possibly be better than this!" I thought to myself. But I was wrong. The reality is, no matter how long you work at your craft or how many journal articles and books you end up publishing, you're probably never going to be genuinely satisfied. Once my Grace Journal essay had appeared, I was already writing another journal article for publication. And then came another. And another. And then I went from publishing in evangelical journals to publishing in more mainstream journals. I thought, "Why stop with The Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society? Why not try to get published in New Testament Studies or Novum Testamentum"?
This cycle of always seeming to want more is called the hedonic treadmill.
And it affects more than just our scholarly life. Seems our brains are hardwired to keep us striving for more and more. For example, when I was a novice weightlifter, I recall thinking to myself, "If I can just lose some body fat and put on some muscle, I'll be happy." However, the fact is that as your physique improves, you'll mentally return to baseline, and your achievements just won't satisfy you any longer. Each new level you achieve just becomes your new normal and it won't satisfy you anymore. Maybe you've experienced the same thing. I think the solution to this problem is to just to accept it and acknowledge that you will never be fully satisfied or fully content with everything. Having a lean and muscular body is not going to make you happy any more than having a long list of publications on your resume will ever truly satisfy you. None of these external things will put you into an internally happy state. I myself have worked hard at writing and exercising and I do get a feeling of satisfaction from being in relatively good shape and from contributing to the world of New Testament scholarship. But I don't think that any of these things is going to make me fulfilled or happy on some kind of fundamental level. Only my relationship with Christ will. He saves. He keeps. He satisfies.
I can hear one of the apostle Paul's old friends saying, "Poor old Saul. He got off to such a great start. He was a straight-A student under Gamaliel the Second. Then he went on to become a member of the Supreme Jewish Council. But one day on the road to Damascus he must have had a sunstroke or something, because ever since then he's been a religious lunatic. Not to mention the fact that he's always in prison. What a tragic waste of potential!"
And yet we have completely forgotten Paul's contemporaries and are still reading Paul. Everything depends on what -- or who -- we are living for.