Happily Dissatisfied: 14 Years of PI
Sunrise on one of the first summits we climbed together.
Fourteen years ago, two people, who met in college, decided to build a life together.
Not a perfect life but as it turns out, an interesting one.
Here’s what nobody tells you about long relationships. The goal is never to “arrive.” It is to keep walking. Together. Sometimes stumbling. Sometimes carrying each other. But always moving.
I’ve been thinking about this phrase lately - Happily dissatisfied.
It sounds like a contradiction. It’s not.
Being happily dissatisfied means waking up grateful for what you have while refusing to believe this is all there is.
It means loving your life and still asking: what else is possible?
We have built something real over these fourteen years. A partnership. A home. A safe space to fail. To be accepted.
Twin daughters who challenge everything we thought we knew. A repository of our knowledge born out of our experiences in life and experiments in parenting.
And yet.
We’re not done.
We don’t want to be done.
The trap of “enough”
Society has this weird obsession with contentment as an endpoint. Find your person. Check. Have kids. Check. Build a career. Check. Now sit back and be grateful.
But gratitude without growth is just stagnation wearing a smile.
Ideal couples aren’t the ones who have “figured it out.”
They’re the ones still figuring it out. Still having hard conversations at midnight. Still surprising each other. Still choosing each other, actively, not out of habit but out of genuine desire.
That’s what happily dissatisfied looks like in a marriage.
You can hold your partner’s hand and still reach for something more. Not more than them. More with them.
What parenting taught us about this
When our twin daughters - Tara and Tashi - arrived, everything we thought we knew got thrown out the window.
Twin newborns. Two working parents. No consistent help. The logical response would have been to just survive. To lower every expectation until we could breathe again.
Instead, we got curious.
What if we didn’t have to choose between our ambitions and our children? What if the struggle itself was the teacher?
We potty trained them by 2 years 2 months. Not because we’re special. But because we worked logically and happily accepted whatever came to us.
We took them to Europe at 10 months. 3 countries, 22 cities. Three weeks. Not because we wanted to prove something. Because we asked: why not?
That’s “happily dissatisfied” parenting.
You love your kids exactly as they are. And you believe in who they’re becoming. Both things. At once.
The danger of pure satisfaction
There are parents who are completely satisfied. They’ve optimized everything. Routines locked in. Expectations managed. Surprises eliminated.
They’re not happy. They’re just comfortable.
Comfort is the enemy of growth. For you. For your marriage. For your children.
When you stop questioning, you stop evolving. When you stop being a little dissatisfied, you stop trying. And when you stop trying, you start ‘not living’. Slowly. Invisibly. But surely.
It’s a choice, you either choose comfort or growth!
The danger of pure dissatisfaction
On the other extreme, there are people who are never happy. Nothing is ever good enough. Every achievement is trivialised and every failure is accentuated. Every milestone is just evidence of how far they still have to go.
That’s exhausting. For them. For everyone around them.
Dissatisfaction without happiness is just suffering with ambition.
The magic is in the “happily” part. The gratitude. The presence.
The ability to sit in this moment, with this person, in this life, and think, rather believe - this is good. This is really good.
And then, in the very next breath: what’s next?
Fourteen years of PI
PI started as a joke. Pankhuri and Ishan. Our initials. Our shorthand.
Then it became something. Something meaningful. Something no one had seen, but what P & I believed, could exist. It became a dream fulfilled for two 20-year somethings and they didn’t even know that this was their dream.
A partnership. A philosophy. A way of approaching life that says: we’re going to figure this out together, and we’re never going to stop figuring it out.
And when we were gifted with the square in PI (our twins), is when we could connect the dots backwards. But believe us, back in the day they did look like random, frustrating blips.
Life of PI Square exists because we refused to accept the parenting scripts handed to us. Because we asked questions that made people uncomfortable, but it provoked them to think. We could see wonder in their eyes.
With that, we kept at it. Just being present, showing up everyday for PI Square - dissatisfied with the status quo, while still being deeply, genuinely happy with the family we were building.
Fourteen years in, we believe that the couples who make it aren’t the ones who find something and become content. They’re the ones who want more together.
The parents who raise extraordinary kids aren’t the ones who have it all figured out. They’re the ones who stay curious, who keep experimenting, who model for their children what it looks like to be grateful and hungry at the same time.
An invitation
If you’re reading this and something resonates, I want you to ask yourself:
Are you happy? Are you satisfied?
We need to be happy because that someday will never come.
We also need to be dissatisfied because then only we can create the best, which is yet to come!
That’s what we wish for you. That’s what we’re still learning ourselves. Fourteen years in and counting.
Here’s to being happily dissatisfied. Together!
💬 Let’s Redefine “Smart Parenting”
At Life of Pi Square, we believe that parenting is logical, and the smartest parents aren’t the ones using the latest apps.
They’re the ones who know when to pause and listen.
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