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The Lost Virtue of Contentment
Contentment is an old-fashioned virtue, isn’t it? There’s something undeniably passé and quaint about it; its status is so. . . plain. Maybe it’s a vaguely charming notion, we’ll think, but isn’t it kind of disturbingly motionless? Unexciting and empty?
We’ll go further: perhaps contentment is a fitting philosophy for those on the tail end of life, repetitively rocking on their porches for hours on end, staring at the summer sun, say. But for those of us in the grip of young adulthood or middle-age — those life stages of set-up and tireless maintenance, respectively, contentment is often dismissed with a flick of supposed irrelevance.
Few are those that preach contentment as something worth aiming at. After all, the halls of America are blazoned with hails to ambition. Ambition is worshiped and with it, the restless, entrepreneurial spirit endemic of our nation.
Make no mistake: ambition has its time and place. Our lives would grow slack absent this royally-spurring hunger (so too would our standard of living and sky-high innovation thresholds deteriorate).
Ambition is a magnificent quality in its own right, but by choosing to deify it too exclusively we risk contracting burnout, spending our lives lusting after the future and ignoring the present, and living in a state of perpetual anxiety. (Just to name a few of…
