When Life Leaves Us Wanting More
Author Claire Jia on social comparison, longing, and contentment.
Posted July 1, 2025 | Reviewed by Kaja Perina
Longing embodies thoughts and feelings about life’s imperfections matched with a vision of an ideal, alternative experience of life that is outside of our grasp. According to researchers, longing is an intense recurrent experience marked by emotional ambivalence, and is often focused on a certain domain of our lives, whether its romantic relationships , career , or family.
These experiences of wanting are often rich in symbolic meaning. The object of our desire represents a broad range of deep motives and wants. In the midst of wanting, we often evaluate our lives, comparing ourselves and our situation to an imagined ideal or successful person. Those who experience high levels of longing in life tend to experience reduced well-being and a global desire for change. However, most people who struggle with unfulfilled longings tend to feel like they have little control or power to make a change in that area of their life (Kotter-Grühn, D., 2009).
Debut author Claire Jia explores social comparison, longing, and contentment in her novel Wanting , and brings insightful observations, personal experiences, and a passion for bringing real life to the page in a way that is relatable to readers who long for more.
Q: Your book explores the common experience of longing for more in life. Thanks to hedonic adaptation , we tend to get accustomed to the good things in our lives, opening the door for desire to creep back in and leave us wanting more. While wanting more might reduce well-being, wanting what we already have may reduce attention to have-want discrepancies. What longings in your own life inspired this book? Why do you think so many of us struggle to feel like our lives are “enough”?
Claire Jia (CJ): I feel like I have always been someone with many desires and wants, and I think my main character is in some ways a little bit like me, but she’s a much more amplified version. She’s someone who always feels the goal post moving forward and she can’t do the thing she needs to do to get what she wants, even though someone else might look at her life and say that she’s gotten a lot of things. The thing about her I relate to is a sense of liberation and niceness, about just being happy with what you have currently.
Throughout the book she really struggles with the questions, ‘Am I allowed to be happy with what I have?’ ‘Could I be pushing myself to go for things that I don’t have, and could life be better if I had them?’ I think this happens a lot with romantic relationships specifically, and romance is a main lens through which this is explored.
Wanting raises questions of what do you really want for yourself versus what do you think society wants you to want? This is a question I explore in my own life, that my friends explore, and that my characters explore in the book. Some of my favorite parts in the book is when my main character is comparing her relationship with her boyfriend, who is a bit more reserved, to her best friend and her best friend’s fiance, whose relationship is a lot more outwardly affectionate, a lot more touchy-feely, and that causes my main character to wonder, is there a specific kind of love that’s missing from my relationship? That is something that I have personally felt – there’s a certain mode of a happy couple that we look at, and if you’re not doing that in your relationship you think, is there something wrong here? I wanted to capture those little things in my novel that can be emblematic of longing.
I also found it interesting to explore how gender roles shift and women and men are starting to take on more similar roles. The women in my character’s life project that responsibility on her to embody those societal changes, but she feels ashamed that she actually takes pride in assuming a more traditional role. For me, personally, I’m someone who happens to love taking care of people that I love – I’m an older sibling , so I’m used to taking care of people and taking charge, being responsible. I think that can clash with the idea of wanting to defy gender roles, and how do I reconcile those two desires?
Q: Contentment is distinct from happiness and is associated with life satisfaction, self-acceptance, and well-being. Taking it a step further, people who practice gratitude tend to be more satisfied with their lives. Do friends Ye and Luo discover contentment or gratitude in Wanting ? How might contentment and gratitude have shifted the narrative for these characters?
CJ: Let’s just say they are all lacking a little bit of gratitude! Their journey in the book is to discover that. Dissatisfaction is the name of the game for my character at the beginning of the novel. My characters are people who, on the outside, you’d think have great lives. But they look at each other thinking, what if I had your life?
I think you can both be thankful for your life but also wonder what else could have happened for you. My character is someone who wants to be allowed to just be happy with what she has and in that way is grateful for her life, but feels pushed externally and by something inside her to want to ask for more and to question what she has, so that is an interesting tug and pull. She wonders, maybe I'm being thankful too early. Maybe I'm settling. Maybe I could have more in my life. These characters, they’ve not read a lot of Psychology Today, or examined unexplored deep ways of reframing their lives.
Q: In the book, Ye struggles with jealousy toward her childhood best friend, Luo. We are more likely to be jealous of a close friend’s life than an acquaintance, but when our friends keep their successes a secret it actually only serves to amplify those envious feelings. However, one study showed that jealousy in friendship motivates us to maintain the friendship and demonstrates that we value the relationship. How does jealousy impact Ye and Luo’s friendship in the book? Have you ever personally overcome jealousy in a friendship?
CJ: Jealousy is a key theme in the book, and is the emotion that’s going on between these two former best friends. The woman who goes to California and comes back is living the dream she always thought she would have, but wasn’t able to make it happen for herself. It’s like salt in the wound – she’s living the life you’ve always wanted but never tried for. Your close friends are like you in a way, they represent the you that succeeded and you’re the you that didn’t.
A lot of the emotions explored in the novel, the jealousy and comparison, is something I’ve experienced in my own life, mostly when I was younger in high school. Now I’m a television writer in L.A. and that is the land of comparison, everywhere around you there’s going to be somebody more successful than you at what you’re doing, and smarter, younger, and more beautiful than you. When it comes to the idea of comparison when you get an internet personality , like in the book, it’s very easy to be jealous of her because she’s putting her glossiest aspects on the Internet for everyone to see, and we don’t see what her life is really like until she confides in her friend.
I'd add that in some ways the grievances of the characters are quite small, or their jealousies might be construed as petty, and the things they do to change their lives might feel not as consequential in some ways. I think that is reflective of the things we undertake in real life, because in real life when you’re jealous of your friend you don’t do something insane and slash her tires or try to get her fired, you just sort of quietly simmer or think to yourself a lot or maybe take up rock climbing. I think the actions of my characters in my novel reflect the realities of how someone would cope with that in real life. Just because it's not a huge reaction doesn’t mean it doesn't feel very big to you.
Q: What do you hope readers take away from spending time with Wanting ?
CJ: I just hope that readers feel seen in the novel. I think that the seed of the novel was my interest in China and Beijing, my home in so many ways. There's not a ton of Chinese American writers and not a lot of books in general set in China written by Chinese American writers. We're just starting to get Chinese literature translated into English, which is very exciting. I really wanted to write something that did not in any way exoticize China. I wanted to show regular people living their lives there and show American readers that many of the same kind of anxieties and feelings of jealousy or inadequacy are similar anywhere you go in the world, albeit with a slightly different backdrop. I really took care to walk this line of bringing out the interesting details and specificity of Beijing while also rooting my story in something that was universal.
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Heather Rose Artushin, LISW-CP, is a child and family therapist passionate about the power of reading.
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This article is part of the Bringwise Psychology Journal — daily insights on human behavior, mental health, and personal growth.