We don’t need more happiness
At least, not at the expense of contentment.
I’m generally a cheerful guy. People describe me as being easy-going and positive, and people generally find my diagnosis of depression pretty difficult to believe. I get a lot of ‘you seem so happy all the time!,’ which I suppose is true. I have a lot of happy moments most days.
This is not incompatible with depression, however, because being happy is something that can evaporate pretty quick whereas depression hangs behind every moment like a shadow, making it quite difficult to feel satisfaction with life as a whole. This means that every happy moment has a footnote: ‘this is not as good as it should be.’
Being content, however, is something very different from being happy. Contentment, at least in the sense I am using it, is an acceptance and appreciation of what one has. In other words, it is a sense of satisfaction with the way things have turned out so far. I’ve never been a content person and I think the endless society-driven pursuit of happiness is one of the factors that is to blame.
It’s a little funny, actually — the more you encourage people to be ‘happy’ and the more society turns being ‘unhappy’ into something pathological, the less content people become and the less they appreciate the good parts of their lives.
