Is contentedness an illusion?
November 4, 2007 at 12:57 pm | Philosophy | No comment
A few months ago I was talking to a friend of mine about my plan to exit the country stage right.
He said to me that I would probably be missing the UK and rueing whatever country I was in after a few months.
I pondered on this for a little and realised that although it was almost certainly going to be true at times, that it was absolutely irrelevant!
Nothing, nowhere, no-one is ever perfect and whether you’re focusing on something’s faults or its virtues depends wholly upon your mood.
If you take my friend’s view, which appeared to all intents and purposes to be “Your life still won’t be perfect, so why bother?” then you will probably rationalise your current situation as “as good as it gets”.
It may even be partly true, you may have by a manner of metrics a fairly good life, but it’s all for nowt if your prevailing feeling is one of boredom or frustration.
As Winston Smith (1984) observed, if your mind screams out that a situation is unacceptable, that it is wrong, not the way things are supposed to be, then despite the insistance of those around you, you’re probably right.
I was proverbially twiddling my thumbs at my desk the other day, vainly trying to pass the hours while simultaneously attempting to look like I was doing work (even though I had none!) and thereby justifying the exorbitant salary they’re paying me to do fuck all, when I remarked upon this situation to a friend in a similar position.
He wasn’t a colleague, infact he was a Norweigan living in Ireland doing first line support for IBM, a good friend of mine and one of the ever dwindling number of people that I can talk to about things of this nature without being called a self-righteous posh git with more hot air than a collection of politicians on a publicity drive after a vindaloo.
He was experiencing the exact same thing, for each day was a mindless drive of mixture of interminable boredom and incessent frustration with the repition of our tasks.
This can’t be right? Can it?
We can’t be supposed to spend our lives waiting for our annual holiday, our weekend or even our evening (which are further filled with the endless maintenance required to live).
I’ve heard the phrase “If all you’re doing is the same old thing, then that’s exactly what’s going to happen to you”.
Which pointed at your average office worker will doubtless raise a chuckle or a murmur of agreement before they go back to ignoring it and finding excuses as to why they keep doing the same old thing in order to justify their unhappiness to themselves or to trick themselves into believing that they are infact “contented”.
There’s wisdom in the old adage that you can’t expect to be happy all the time.
Infact, I think the pursuit of happiness is a false pursuit.
Everyone wants to be happy, but we can’t all be happy all the time, it’s compeltely impossible.
Contentedness is merely coming to terms with repetition.
So what should we persue?
Interest!
We can’t be happy all the time, but we can be interested all the time.
Life is a fight against boredom for meaning.
What meaning we choose to strive for is our own choice (albeit influenced by those around us and a million other factors), but what we should not do is settle for safety.