Member-only story
Why Just Being ‘Happy’ Can Never Last
This holiday season, discover how the radical concept of contentment can change your life
If you’re not a Medium member, this friend link will bypass the paywall.
It has now become a Sign of the Season, as symbolic as the changing of the colors of the falling leaves: the ritual bemoaning by columnists that what was once a national holiday to express gratitude at what we have has instead become the starting gun for the annual mad rush to buy what we think we want.
They are not wrong, of course. But their wistful regret at what Thanksgiving has, in part, become is a railing at the effects of this change, rather than at its causes.
The issue is that thankfulness — the traditional leitmotif of the celebration — doesn’t really exist on its own: it is but one component of a deeper, more lasting and more philosophical state of being that is increasingly rare today.
Without that wider context, “being grateful” is merely a near-obligatory good intention dispatched in a couple of minutes at the start of the turkey dinner marking our annual commemoration of that famous 1621 feast the Pilgrims enjoyed together with their Wampanoag neighbors.