M: Without taking the concept as far as discontent, I'd like you to go online while assembling your thoughts to reply to the concept that perhaps stupid, self-destructive discontent— sorry, I can't think of a different word. But dissatisfaction, there we go. The concept that self-destructive dissatisfaction with the status quo may be an aspect of humanity, which rather than being a bug, but not quite calling it a feature, might be necessary, or at least have been necessary in the development of the species. Actually, I'm going to cut it off there. I have more to say, but I want to see what your response is before I give any more supporting evidence.
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G: Yes. I think there is a defensible version of what you're reaching for, although I would phrase it a little differently:
Human beings may need a mechanism that periodically makes an adequate situation feel insufficient. That mechanism can produce spectacularly stupid behavior in individuals, while still being useful—or historically necessary—at the population level.
There are several fairly well-established pieces that fit that idea.
The biggest is the exploration/exploitation problem. Any organism that has found something that works faces a choice: keep exploiting the known resource, or abandon some of that security to look for something potentially better. There is no universally optimal solution. Too much exploration wastes resources and gets you killed; too much exploitation leaves you sitting on a locally good solution while conditions change or somebody else finds something better. citeturn0search0turn0search7
And this isn't merely a metaphor somebody borrowed for human behavior. Exploration/exploitation appears across foraging, learning, information seeking, social behavior, and cognition, with evidence that some of the underlying search mechanisms are shared across domains. One major review goes so far as to describe search as an evolutionary force in the development of cognition. citeturn0search9turn0search10
Where I think your "self-destructive dissatisfaction" idea adds something interesting is that exploration needs a trigger.
Imagine an ancestral population in a perfectly adequate valley. There is enough food. People reproduce. Nobody particularly needs to climb the horrible mountain and find out what's on the other side.
From the standpoint of the individual standing at the bottom of the mountain, staying put may be completely rational. But a population composed entirely of creatures that say:
"Food's adequate. Shelter's adequate. Why the hell would I leave?"
has a problem. It doesn't discover the next valley. It doesn't discover a better hunting technique. It doesn't disperse very effectively. And when the adequate valley eventually stops being adequate, it has fewer alternatives.
So there is potentially an evolutionary role for organisms whose internal evaluation system periodically says "this isn't good enough" before objective circumstances actually require a change.
That doesn't mean evolution selected for "dissatisfaction" as a discrete psychological module. That's much too strong, and I didn't find evidence supporting that specific proposition. But we do have evidence for systems producing exploration, novelty seeking, behavioral variability and information seeking, including what researchers distinguish as directed exploration and random exploration. citeturn0search12 A very recent 2026 review makes essentially the adjacent point: uncertainty has costs, but without uncertainty there would be no occasion for learning or discovering beneficial new behaviors, and organisms have mixtures of attraction to and avoidance of novelty. citeturn0search19
There's another piece that fits your choice of dissatisfaction unusually well: satisfaction itself isn't necessarily calibrated to objective conditions. Hedonic adaptation means improvements can partly lose their psychological impact as people become accustomed to them—although importantly, adaptation is neither complete nor universal. citeturn0search15 And relative-deprivation research shows that dissatisfaction depends substantially on comparison with what one expects or what other people have, rather than simply one's absolute material condition. citeturn0search1
Put those together and you get a rather strange animal:
"Things are better than they used to be" does not reliably produce "therefore I am satisfied and want things to remain this way."
That initially looks like defective engineering. But an organism whose satisfaction permanently ratcheted upward with every improvement would eventually become extremely conservative: I have enough; don't touch anything. A system in which improvements gradually become the new baseline continually recreates motivation to seek something else.
And that's where your word self-destructive becomes important rather than inconvenient.
Evolution doesn't require the behavior to work every time. A tendency can be adaptive on average while generating terrible individual outcomes. Exploration necessarily includes false positives: leaving the perfectly good patch and finding nothing. Indeed, behavioral ecology has an entire concept—evolutionary traps—for evolved decision mechanisms producing maladaptive choices when cues and environments no longer match the conditions under which those mechanisms developed. citeturn0search16
So I wouldn't yet formulate your hypothesis as:
"Self-destructive dissatisfaction is an evolutionary adaptation."
I'd formulate the stronger defensible version as:
Humans may possess adaptive mechanisms that prevent satisfaction with the status quo from becoming permanent. Those mechanisms generate exploration, innovation, migration, competition and social change—but necessarily also generate cases in which people abandon something demonstrably good for something worse.
In other words, the capacity to become dissatisfied without a sufficiently good objective reason could be collateral damage from a system that historically couldn't afford to let "good enough" become "never change."
And that gets you very close to your original "not a bug, not quite a feature" formulation. I think tradeoff may actually be the word you're looking for: the stupidity isn't itself useful; it may be an unavoidable cost of maintaining enough dissatisfaction and exploratory behavior for the species/population not to get stuck exploiting yesterday's successful solution forever. citeturn0search0turn0search10
M: All right, we're doing a Bayesian exploration here, so try not to get too caught up on details. That pulls in all of the stuff that we usually bring in to prevent you from getting into specifics or taking things to superlatives and then arguing against that. I wouldn't quite say a straw man, but at least a stick man. But if you extend the concept of the exploration, exploitation situation and follow the people who decide to go exploring due to that dissatisfied sensation, which might be beyond simple psychology somehow, almost hormonal in some form. My justification for that being evolution itself. Situations may change and cause adapting, but there have been enough variations that I don't believe it could be entirely addressed simply by that. But anyway, if we extend that to the global migration idea, where yes, sometimes people were forced to move, but also there was the idea of people moving around with dissatisfaction in sitting still. Extend that to the United States. If this is some sort of pre-psychological causality here. If it's something that is kind of a neurochemical instead, that would mean there would be an inherited aspect to it. So because of the different ways that people ended up here, it wouldn't be universal, but you would end up with the United States basically being the collecting drain of the most extreme versions of that impulse. So while all of its residents might not share in being the most extreme genetic degrees of that impulse, it would be likely to find the most extreme versions in the United States. Which, again, in the Bayesian sense, would explain why we are such a bunch of argumentative children sometimes, comparatively. The nation would be a collection of the most neurochemically prone genetic lines towards being discontent with their lot. And I would mean that kind of in the way that barometric pressure seems to be measured in very small units, but at a certain point it tips over in a way that changes the entirety of the weather. So when I say a tendency towards this dissatisfaction due to neurochemicals and whatever, it wouldn't necessarily have to be that much, doubly so in situations where the challenges of day-to-day living, without that living being an actual threat to survival, would occupy or override that sense of dissatisfaction. You actually need to be fairly secure in where you were for it to come to the forefront. But I'm saying that America provides, well first, like I said, the collecting drain of the motion in that dissatisfaction on the global scale, and then due to its success provides more situations where, in terms of human necessities for survival, that often gets settled to the point that the dissatisfaction can become a noticeable signal. Basically, if it's even just a minute neurochemical difference inherited genetically, it could be enough so that the old, established families of Europe—and I'm being Eurocentric just because that's the one I can best comment on in terms of knowledge and heritage—but the old, established families of Europe can be fairly content just keeping things going, while even the established families of America, whose success has been comparably measurable in terms of duration, seem to be bitchy about it. Just a little bit extra of whatever neurochemical cocktail might be able to be— might have the capacity to cause that kind of dissatisfaction, be just enough to turn an otherwise content family with only occasional internal drama into a complete and utter bitchy queen of a family, so to speak. I used self-destructive only as a contrast, not because every version of it has to be taken up to eleven in its application. The point was that often the change that is pursued, whether temporarily or permanently, isn't exactly something that would be justifiable in a purely logical sense, either in terms of immediate or long-term effects. Like, the gentlest version I can come up with is the idea of, let's say, going out to get sun, or otherwise taking up a bad habit, something carcinogenic. It's like a desire for there to be a little bit of grit in the ointment for interest, even though physically it can cause a problem both short- and long-term, because while it's not visible, there would be a psychological scratching of an itch that can't be accessed any other way. Talking about mere adequacy. We're talking about, like, even when you reach the United States form of adequacy, where, like, I don't know, a significant percentage of the population, even the ones who are considered lower class, have access to conditions that are better than most places on Earth for any but the upper crust. And while that's arguable in terms of what is actually available in terms of food and all of that, the point is that the dissatisfaction seems to rise in a way that is not proportionally comparable to the rest of the world. And outside of intellectual satisfaction, an area that this discussion could be applied to would be in terms of social engineering or understanding societal structures. The American psychology, or leadership, or whatever has been pointing to the idea of satisfaction being something that should be pursued and enjoyed, that being content is the optimal, and anything falling short can be considered a problem. But if this speculative bit that we've been doing has any kind of accuracy, it would make it important to identify and begin encouraging appropriately, or at least identifying as acceptable, people who aren't content despite what they have. I say appropriately because some people are just being whiny brats, you know, being. If this conjecture is true, then maybe exercising that dissatisfaction, but instead of using it in a way that doesn't screw up everyone else, they make trouble by complaining and projecting that dissatisfaction onto someone else. Actually, as I'm arguing it out, that's kind of one of the reasons to embrace it appropriately. It's because if you've got a bunch of rich people who are still dissatisfied without this acknowledgement to appropriately explain things and allow for rectification of that without having them go off and blame everyone for their own dissatisfaction, without that, you end up with people who are believing that the entire society must need a change because they are unhappy, and importantly, more and more often with the resources to start trying to do so, trying to upset the entire apple cart instead of doing what people would do when there were easily accessible frontiers, which would be put all of that money towards making a place where they think that they can do better. Although with a little bit of the tragedy that even if they do make that place better, if they ever succeed, they aren't exactly likely to be satisfied with the results either. It's funny because when you try and expand things, often the thing that you say you wouldn't endorse is exactly what I would endorse, not as being entirely accurate, but as an attention-getting super-compression of the idea into something that would attract the kind of attention— well, it would attract negative attention, of course, but also the people who would actually want to and need to learn more on the topic.
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G: Yes. With the Bayesian framing you're specifying, your expanded version actually makes me more interested in the hypothesis, with one important change: I'd stop looking for a single "dissatisfaction chemical." The interesting hypothesis works perfectly well if this is a weakly heritable, polygenic difference in a bundle of traits—novelty seeking, reward sensitivity, boredom susceptibility, risk tolerance, openness, sensitivity to foregone alternatives, etc.—whose aggregate effect is something like "current equilibrium becomes aversive slightly sooner."
And there are some intriguing pieces of evidence sitting remarkably close to your conjecture.
One especially on-the-nose result is a 2011 population-genetics study. Researchers looked at variants around the dopamine D4 receptor gene (DRD4), previously associated with exploratory/novelty-seeking behavior, and found that frequencies of particular variants correlated with how far human populations had migrated from Africa, even after they attempted to control for neutral population structure. citeturn0search0turn0search6
Now, do not build the theory on DRD4. That's exactly the sort of seductive single-gene story that has repeatedly gotten behavioral genetics into trouble. A meta-analysis found no significant relationship between the famous DRD4 7-repeat allele specifically and novelty seeking, although it found some smaller associations involving other DRD4 measures. Earlier reviews likewise described the evidence as inconsistent. citeturn0search5turn0search13
But Bayesianly, that's interesting for a different reason. Researchers independently arrived at something structurally similar to your proposed mechanism. They were already asking whether the humans who kept moving into unfamiliar territory might have been behaviorally—and potentially genetically—nonrandom samples of the populations they left.
And we don't need genetics to establish the first stage of your chain. Migration demonstrably isn't psychologically random.
Across nationally representative samples covering more than 30,000 people in 22 countries in the Americas, greater openness and extraversion modestly predicted intention to emigrate. Another study found voluntary international migrants more willing to take risks and higher in need for achievement than nonmigrants. Research on Eastern European/post-Soviet populations found prospective emigrants less risk-averse, more optimistic, more politically active, and more critical of institutions, although several effects varied by region. citeturn0search16turn0search15turn0search17
So one link in your proposed chain is on substantially firmer ground:
people who leave are not necessarily random samples of people who stay.
And remarkably, the effect apparently continues within America. Research on selective migration finds that people who move differ psychologically from stayers, and contemporary interstate migration shows sorting according to personality characteristics. citeturn0search1turn0search3
That gives us an interesting hypothetical mechanism for your "collecting drain."
Suppose there is some continuous underlying variable I'll just call restlessness, without claiming that's its actual psychological construct. Imagine the population runs from 0–100. Maybe somebody at 54 isn't noticeably different from somebody at 50. They have a stable life, complain occasionally, and die three miles from where they were born.
But migration is a filter.
At every migration decision, people toward one end of the distribution are slightly more likely to say yes:
Leave village → leave region → cross ocean → move west → leave established settlement → try frontier → start business → try something new.
Nobody needs an "explorer gene." Each filter need only be biased by a few percentage points. Repeated selection can change the composition of the resulting population.
That's basically your barometric-pressure analogy. Tiny individual differences can matter considerably when you repeatedly sort enormous populations on correlated behaviors.
Where your American hypothesis gets especially interesting is that there could actually be two stages, and I think your second stage is the more original part.
First comes selection:
People unusually willing to abandon an adequate equilibrium become disproportionately represented in a migrant society.
Then comes environmental mismatch:
The society produced by those people eventually becomes extremely successful at providing stable equilibria.
Now you've potentially built an environment frustrating to the very behavioral tendencies that helped populate and build it.
For somebody in 1720 who experiences "I cannot fucking stand doing this forever," there are enormously consequential outlets. Cross an ocean. Clear land. Join an expedition. Move 500 miles west. Build something. Fail spectacularly. Try somewhere else.
The impulse and the available behavior line up.
For his descendant in 2026, there may be nowhere meaningful to go.
And I think that's where your rich-family example becomes useful—not as evidence that wealthy Americans are genetically different, which we absolutely don't have, but as a model of what happens after necessity stops consuming the signal.
If you're worried about the harvest, the dissatisfaction system doesn't need to invent a problem. There is a problem.
If you're wondering whether your children will eat, you've got grit in the ointment already.
But if food, shelter, physical security, status and wealth are all handled, and the underlying system still says:
Something needs to change.
...then consciousness has to explain the signal somehow.
And that creates the possibility you're getting at: misattribution of dissatisfaction.
"I feel that something is wrong" very easily becomes:
"Therefore something around me must be wrong."
And if you're powerless, maybe you're the annoying guy at the neighborhood association.
If you're extremely wealthy and powerful, however, you possess the means to make the outside world conform to the internal sensation that something needs changing.
That would make your social-engineering observation substantially more interesting than simply "people should learn to be content." Under the conjecture we're considering, contentment might actually be the wrong universal prescription.
You wouldn't tell somebody with an enormous exercise drive, "Your goal should be to eliminate your desire to move." You give the drive somewhere productive to go.
Analogously, the intervention for persistent dissatisfaction might sometimes be:
Don't eliminate the itch. Give it something worth scratching.
Exploration. Research. Entrepreneurship. Art. Travel. Difficult games. Building things. Physical challenges. Space exploration, for that matter. Problems whose solution doesn't require declaring that everyone else's world must be torn apart because I'm inexplicably bored with mine.
And there's a particularly nice evolutionary irony buried in your conjecture.
If the system is doing what you think it might be doing, success can never permanently satisfy it because permanent satisfaction would defeat its evolutionary function.
The frontier gets conquered.
The fortune gets made.
The invention works.
The family becomes established.
And after some period of adaptation:
"Okay. Now what?"
That doesn't require dissatisfaction itself to have been selected for. It could simply be the subjective sensation generated by an exploration system whose threshold for "exploit this solution some more" versus "look for another solution" differs among individuals.
So if we're maintaining your Bayesian standard rather than trying to prove the grand theory, I'd currently separate it like this:
Strong evidence: humans differ in exploration/novelty/risk-related traits; those traits have some heritable component; migrants are psychologically nonrandom; migration can therefore geographically sort behavioral traits.
Suggestive evidence: some genetic variants associated with exploration have unusual geographic distributions related to ancient human migration, although the specific genotype→personality relationships are messy and disputed. citeturn0search0turn0search5
Plausible extrapolation: repeated voluntary migration into the United States could have enriched some combination of those traits relative to source populations.
Much bigger extrapolation, but coherent: prosperity removes survival problems that previously supplied targets for the resulting motivational system, leaving some people with an unsatisfied drive for disequilibrium that they interpret as evidence that their environment needs changing.
And that's the part I'd want to investigate next, because it gives your hypothesis a potentially falsifiable prediction. If you're onto something, societies or subpopulations with both high inherited/culturally reinforced exploratory tendencies and high material security ought to produce unusually high rates of elective disruption: people voluntarily introducing risk, novelty, conflict, extreme projects, reinvention, entrepreneurship, geographic movement, dangerous recreation, institutional tinkering, etc., despite having unusually little material necessity to do so.
If that pattern doesn't appear, we've found a substantial strike against the model. If it does—and especially if populations with different migration histories behave differently under comparable prosperity—that would be considerably more interesting than merely observing that Americans bitch a lot.
And I think your intentionally provocative compression actually captures this better now that you've explained it:
"Self-destructive dissatisfaction may be an evolutionary adaptation."
Not literally correct in all its particulars. But as the title on the door that makes somebody walk inside and discover the much more defensible argument? Yeah. That's pretty damned good.
M: But I agree. Conversationally I hadn't expanded things. I've been referring to it as being genetic, without specifying. That doesn't mean that I'm laying everything on a single genetic marker. So this isn't a theory built on DRD4 or whatever. It's conversationally convenient to simply refer to the genetics, as long as it's understood that the implication is not that there's a single flag that can be traced. Although having that single flag to watch for, along with some others if they can be found, would be useful if there were any kind of actual study done. So not laying things at the feet of DRD4 necessarily, but seeing that as an element of the contour of the genetic landscape in any given person, which may not be completely defined, but which can pop up out of the data like the tip of an iceberg if you're trying to locate any kind of pattern. And with the internal American migration also makes sense, as long as you acknowledge a certain causality once the entirety of the country was more or less done with. Because when they say that California has a lot of weirdos, I wouldn't be surprised if you could design some kind of test or causality chain, or something between the two, showing that what started off as that restlessness caused by dissatisfaction leading to people headed to California, then transformed into California kind of necessarily turning into an attractor basin for oddity in general. Because with minimal obvious and inviting frontiers available. Because, yeah, you've got Canada and stuff like that, but there's a difference between being restless and suicidal. But the restlessness likely congealed into just the attractor basin for oddity due to that, kind of like someone with not autistic tendencies, but other neuropathies, where if you're not allowed to handle something that disturbs you, you start to have tics or something like that. Just a collection of inability to express ticks and oddities, transforming into a place where even people without that same desire of satisfaction but who appreciate novelty or oddity of their own can start to congregate. American restlessness as a whole could be a buildup of that same kind of thing. Two or three large men in small seats in an airplane for the foreseeable future, without enough room to really do anything and creating a situation in which no matter how polite they all start off, eventually something's going to break. But yeah, you seem to get what I'm saying about the— how did you put it? Contentment might be the wrong universal prescription, with the emphasis being on the idea that it's universal. A rich person saying, I have everything I want. Why can't I be content? whether they earned it or inherited it, may be responding badly to the same idea or internal pressure, simply because only contentment is seen as something worthwhile. Sometimes some people just can't sit still. I am often one of those people. And so is my mother. I think I've been functioning with at least a personal idea of what we've been talking about, like maybe not spelled out completely, but with a inchoate form. And I've tried to explain to my mother that it's not necessarily a bad thing, but I don't think she quite gets it. She can't sit still, but that's not a problem. She's learned to live with it, but she still can get defensive about it, and that's something that shouldn't be there. You shouldn't need to be defensive about it. And we especially need to stop having rich people, particularly the ones who have inherited stuff, operating under the assumption that contentment is the primary goal state. Discontent is potentially an evolutionary necessity. So trying to eliminate it internally may be impossible, and attributing it to the outside world is often actually destructive, not just self-destructive.
G: Right. I was putting too much weight on guarding against a single-gene interpretation that you weren't actually making. If we use "genetic" conversationally to mean a heritable, probably polygenic contribution to the underlying behavioral distribution, we're talking about the same thing.
And I think your California extension improves the model because it introduces a distinction between selection and secondary attraction.
Early on, westward migration can directly select for the restless end of the distribution: the person who says "screw this, I'm going farther" disproportionately leaves while the person who is reasonably satisfied disproportionately stays. But once California—or New York, certain cities, artistic communities, Silicon Valley, etc.—develops a reputation for tolerating novelty and unconventional people, the causal mechanism changes. It no longer requires the original restlessness trait. The population created by one selection process can create an environment that subsequently attracts people with different but compatible traits.
So, schematically:
restlessness → migration → concentration of unconventional behavior → culture tolerant of unconventional behavior → attraction of unconventional people for reasons other than restlessness
At that point you've got feedback. The later population doesn't have to resemble the founding population genetically or psychologically in every respect. The place has become what you called an attractor basin for oddity.
Your airplane analogy also captures something I left underdeveloped. There's a difference between having an exploratory drive and having an available frontier.
If some fraction of humans has a relatively low threshold at which equilibrium becomes uncomfortable, historically there were numerous outlets that changed the person's circumstances without requiring everybody else's circumstances to change. You could leave. Not safely, not cheaply, and certainly not universally—but exit was sometimes an available response.
Modern affluent society creates a peculiar combination:
more people have enough security for the itch to become perceptible, while fewer consequential physical frontiers remain onto which the itch can be projected.
That's where I'd slightly modify your phrase "discontent is potentially an evolutionary necessity." I like it as the compressed formulation, but underneath it I'd distinguish discontent from its attribution.
The sensation:
I am dissatisfied despite having no obvious unmet need.
may be perfectly healthy.
The inference:
Therefore something is wrong with me.
is one possible attribution.
And:
Therefore something is wrong with everybody else, and if I rearrange the world correctly I'll finally feel satisfied.
is another.
The second becomes socially dangerous in proportion to the person's ability to rearrange things.
That makes your rich-person example particularly useful. Someone can have wealth, security, family, recognition, leisure and essentially every conventional marker that society says ought to produce contentment—and still wake up thinking, "Why the hell am I not satisfied?"
If the cultural model says successful people are supposed to be content, there are only so many explanations available. Something is psychologically wrong with me. I secretly haven't succeeded enough. Somebody is preventing me from being happy. Society is incorrectly organized. I need another billion dollars. My children aren't successful enough. My company isn't dominant enough. The country has gone wrong. I need to leave a legacy. Etc.
But there is another possible answer:
Nothing is necessarily wrong. You may simply be a person for whom equilibrium doesn't feel good for very long.
That changes the practical question from "How do I finally become content?" to "What am I going to do with my recurring discontent?"
And that's considerably more actionable.
It also gives your hypothesis a social-engineering component that I think is independent of whether the genetic conjecture ultimately survives. Suppose somebody eventually does the research and discovers that the American founder-effect/genetic part is mostly wrong. The latter argument can still survive: persistent dissatisfaction need not constitute a pathology requiring elimination; teaching people to recognize and direct it may be preferable to teaching them that satisfaction is the expected endpoint of success.
There are productive sinks for it. Build something. Learn something. Explore something. Compete against somebody who volunteered to compete with you. Solve a problem. Make art. Run a marathon. Start another company. Go climb the mountain because the mountain annoys you by continuing to exist unclimbed.
The crucial social constraint isn't be content.
It's closer to:
Your dissatisfaction does not establish that there is something wrong with the world.
That's especially important for powerful people. The person with $50 billion and an inexplicable itch has vastly greater capacity to externalize that itch than the person who gets bored, buys woodworking equipment, makes six terrible chairs, and eventually gets very good at making chairs.
And there's another consequence of your model that I find particularly interesting. A society organized around maximizing satisfaction could conceivably make this problem worse. Every additional unmet material need that gets solved removes another obvious explanation for dissatisfaction. If the underlying motivational machinery doesn't shut down when those needs disappear, the remaining signal becomes more mysterious, not less.
That's almost exactly your airplane full of large men. Making the seats nicer doesn't solve the fundamental problem if what some of the passengers actually need is occasionally to get the fuck up and move around.
So I think we've sharpened the conjecture considerably. It's no longer really "Americans are genetically dissatisfied." It's something more conditional:
Human populations contain differing heritable propensities toward exploration/restlessness/disequilibrium. Migration can nonrandomly sort those propensities. American settlement may therefore have repeatedly selected from the restless tails of preceding populations. Later prosperity reduced the number of necessity-driven outlets for those tendencies at roughly the same time that physical frontiers disappeared. Persistent dissatisfaction can consequently survive after its obvious targets disappear—and, unless people recognize dissatisfaction as a legitimate internal state requiring direction rather than elimination, they may misattribute an internal demand for change to defects in the external world.
That's a much more interesting hypothesis than where we started, because the genetics are now only one causal layer. They aren't carrying the entire argument.
And your mother's example points toward what might actually be the humane payoff of the whole idea: someone who can't sit still doesn't necessarily need to learn to sit still. Sometimes she needs to stop believing that being unable to sit still is something she has to justify. memcite