Buddhism - Dissatisfaction
The answer lies in the middle but needs to be seen from the extremes
I was thinking about Buddhism last night and the story that I remembered about how the Siddhartha Gautama (Buddha) achieved Nirvana (Enlightenment).
He grew up protected from the suffering of the world, his father made sure to give him whatever he desired and tried to make sure that he would not see the suffering of others, but even in this there was a sense of dissatisfaction. But, when he finally left his palace into the real world, he saw the suffering that people endure every day. This caused an existential crisis within him, and after some time he gave up all his possessions and took up being a hermit monk, and embraced the suffering, and looked for the meaning of suffering. But he learned that those two extremes, the prince and the monk, is not where the answer laid. But it was somewhere in the middle. And after he started meditation again after coming to this conclusion, he was able to discover the 4 Noble Truths and the Eightfold path.
The part of the story that I am interested in is the swing from riches to rags. If he had gone in the other direction, from rags to riches, would he still have been able to become the Buddha? What about if he had lived an average life from the beginning. The core tenets of Buddhism are centered around dissatisfaction and how it is caused by desire. Because he had been to the top and the bottom of the mountain, he knew that satisfaction did not exist in either location.