Letter: Would you rather be happy or content?

By Letter to the Editor on April 9, 2021.

Dear editor,

Would you rather be happy, or content? Often this is stated as a choice between the two as if it is a high-stakes contest between fun and settling. Why not, however, have both?

The United States Constitution says the “pursuit” of happiness is a right. No one anywhere is happiness guaranteed. There are happy homeless peopl and miserable millionaires.

Happiness comes in hits, sparks, blips of momentary euphoria in a sea of ordinary good and bad and neutral life events. You get something shiny and new and you’re happy with it for a short time, then the new wears off and you’re off to seek another new, shiny object or person to “make you happy.”

Happiness is the zest of life. It’s fun and alluring, but difficult to impossible to maintain. Drugs, alcohol and gambling can offer similar “highs” and an ersatz happiness with the dangers of possible addiction and ruin.

This is all well and good. The pursuit of happiness keeps the luxury-market economy rolling, it keeps assembly lines and jobs humming, self-help books and media selling and relationship mediators and divorce lawyers busy.

Contentment however, is sustainable over the long term once our basic survival needs are assured. It is deeper, soul-satisfying and relaxingly pleasurable. It is what old lovers have that young lovers don’t.

The singer Cheryl Crow says in her song Soak Up the Sun, “It’s not having what you want it’s wanting what you’ve got.”

It’s not settling, but it is giving up the stress, anxiety and worry of an unnecessary and unhealthy fight.

I know contented people who are neither madly pursuing the next shiny bauble they think will make them happy, nor the asceticism of self-denial or abject minimalism.

I believe we can still pursue happiness for fun without being enslaved by such pursuit, and we can find contentment which will fortify against the unavoidable vagaries of human existence.

The writer was a depressed and anxious mental illness patient with Tuberous Sclerosis Complex who became a social work student and a mental health worker.

Ray Marco

Dunmore

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