The struggle with contentment

Some wholesome negativity and why contentment is not a popular feature in commercial stories

The other day, a squirrel made me realize how small my human existence is. It was napping content on a mango branch; the rounded belly pressed against the tree told me that it had had its fill of April mangoes. The squirrel was done for the day. I, on the other hand, was not done. I don’t stop just because today’s meal is sorted. I go on. My today’s needs were met a long time ago, but I go on because I want more things with very logical reasons to them. On one hand, I have greater security than the squirrel, I assure myself. But, do I?, I half wonder, looking at the unread alerts that NewsWire has for me; probably about wars, fuel shortage, the oncoming El Niño drought and so on. The squirrel slept on contentedly. It will rise later and go on to hide somewhere as the sun sets, while I continue to work. I’m grateful for my good life, and I’m often happy. But I’m rarely content. I’m rarely stilled, wanting nothing more than the present. I am hardly ever embedded in a complete moment in time. And just for that sheer distinction, I was fairly certain that the squirrel was happier than I was with all my human gravity.

This got me thinking about contentment, one of the most overlooked states of mind. The more I looked into it, the more I found that the human species has a particularly challenged relationship with contentment.

Less of an emotion, more of a knowing.

Emotions are reactions; they are evoked in response to something outside you; they peak and subside. Contentment doesn’t behave that way. It has no spike. It generates no urgency. Psychologist Daniel Cordaro, who led the Contentment Lab at Yale and spent years studying emotional expression across cultures, found that contentment is the only positive state that requires no external input whatsoever. Every other good feeling is, in some sense, a response. Contentment is a position, a form of inner conviction. This is probably why most philosophies explain it as ‘a knowing’.

Language is always a good place to start exploring how the collective understands or defines an idea. For contentment, Sinhala gives us truptiya, from the Sanskrit tṛpti, the sensation of being quenched, filled, satiated. It is the same root used for the satisfaction of drinking when genuinely thirsty, and for spiritual fulfilment. Tamil Mana-niravu is a compound word combining manathu (mind/heart) and niravu (relief/completion), literally translating to “fullness of the heart or mind”. The English contentment comes from the Latin contentus, a term originally applied to vessels. Cups, barrels, containers that are full and therefore closed to anything more. When the word migrated from objects to people, it carried that logic with it: a contented person is one who is complete, intact, needing no addition. The Sanskrit santosha means much the same: acceptance of the whole of it.

The Bhutanese word ‘chok shay’, comes from one of the least contacted villages on earth; it translates directly as “the knowledge of enough.” Not the feeling of enough, but the knowledge. In Chinese, the Taoist concept zhī zú carries the identical construction: knowing sufficiency. As Tao Te Ching wisely says, “the one who knows they have enough, is rich.”

The Pali word santhutti appears in one of the most quoted Buddhist statements, “contentment is the highest wealth,” valuing it more than any possession or accomplishment.

What all of these philosophies and cultures understood, and what modern psychology is now confirming, is that contentment is not a feeling that comes, peaks, and goes. It’s a form of knowledge and a recognition that can be cultivated.

The thing is, contentment isn’t profitable.

As a commercial writer, my studio gets requests for stories designed to create inspiration or enjoyment, nostalgia, desire, intrigue, and even amusement. But rarely do people ask for stories of contentment. In media and entertainment, too contentment is not popular.

There is a good reason contentment does not appear in advertising: it cannot. An advertisement that genuinely produced contentment in its viewer would be the last advertisement that the viewer ever needed. Contentment closes the loop. It is the state in which nothing is lacking, and an economy premised on manufactured lack cannot survive contact with a population that has sincerely arrived there.

This is not a modern pathology so much as a modern design. Economist Thorstein Veblen described, as far back as 1899, how the opposite of contentment creates perpetual upward social comparison and a restless calibration of one’s position against others. He termed it conspicuous consumption. To keep selling, desire should not be satisfied, but just routinely upgraded.

Commercial stories, the kind that moves product or service, run on six or seven reliable emotional engines: desire, aspiration, nostalgia, belonging, fear of missing out, wonder, amusement. Contentment is not among them, and cannot be. It is a way of seeing that, if successfully created, ends the transaction.

But, I do think there’s room for contentment in commercial stories; that’s the next one up in our guides; the Utopian, one of the 12 Jungian archetypes we use in our studio methodology to construct brand personas.

Is contentment even biologically compatible?

If contentment is so universally prized across cultures, so carefully named and so precisely defined, the obvious question is why it remains so rare. One reason is economic, as above. But there is another reason: contentment may be rare because evolution did not prioritize it. We are, in a very specific biological sense, built for discontent.

The human brain’s default mode is not rest but vigilance. The negativity bias, the well-documented tendency to weigh threats more heavily than equivalent rewards, is not a flaw in the system but its original purpose. In an environment where the cost of missing a predator vastly outweighed the cost of missing a fruit, the brain that kept scanning, kept worrying, kept projecting forward, survived. The brain that settled into satisfaction was, in the ancestral environment, the brain that got eaten.

This creates a precise paradox. The very cognitive machinery that allowed us humans to dominate every ecosystem it entered, like restless problem-solving, insatiable curiosity, the perpetual modelling of what is not yet present, is the same that makes contentment structurally difficult. We are, as the evolutionary psychologist Robert Wright has mentioned, wired for a ‘hedonic treadmill’, each attainment recalibrates the baseline upward, so that the same brain that celebrated the achievement immediately begins scanning for the next deficiency. Neurologically, there is no end to our search for happiness. Sadly, we humans are not biologically designed for contentment.

But, maybe we can micro-dose on contentment to get past ‘what’s the point of all this?’

I might not be designed for contentment, but maybe I can use it to quell my restless brain when it hits that familiar wall.

If we read between the lines of our best recorded knowledge on contentment, it’s not that we require the suppression of our humanness to access it. I think the realistic human approach to contentment is to revisit it as a recalibrating mindframe. When our striving gets overwhelming, remembering ‘sufficiency’ would help for a little while; do what must be done, and know when it is done. We don’t have to silence the human animal or pretend to become monastic beings while daytiming as working people. We can build capacity for accurate self-assessment and know the difference between genuine need and the brain’s ambient restlessness. Do we need to buy all that toilet paper just because the war is escalating? We know the better answer to that.

At one end, the squirrel that triggered this exploration into contentment is only content because its nervous system is beautifully calibrated to the present: hunger, satiation, warmth, threat and procreation. It cannot anticipate next year’s drought or worry about whether it has done enough with its life. Its contentment is real, but it is the contentment of a closed system. At the other end of the spectrum, if such a thing can be imagined, is a consciousness so complete, so fully knowing, that it would have no gap between what is and what it understands. No uncertainty to generate anxiety. No future to dread. Contentment from absolute knowing, as opposed to contentment from minimal knowing.

The human condition sits somewhere in the uncomfortable middle and has always known it. We know too much to rest like the squirrel and too little to rest like a god. We can anticipate loss without being able to prevent it. We can imagine a better version of our lives with enough vividness to make the present feel insufficient. This is not a design flaw exactly. It is what produced art, medicine, mathematics, and the question of whether a squirrel is more evolved than its observer. But it also produced the churning of the never-ending ins and outs of commerce, the lined-up tasks, the perpetual forward lean we have.

Maybe, then, it’s not to envy the squirrel. It’s how to borrow, briefly and deliberately, what the squirrel has without surrendering who we are. Not contentment as a destination, but contentment as a practice; the conscious, occasional act of closing the loop and returning to what is currently complete in our lives. Maybe all the human traditions and philosophies named contentment so carefully and deliberately because it isn’t automatic for us. Because contentment has to be chosen by us.

So, I sit in brief contentment over tea and watch mango leaves in the breeze, before I go back to my tasks. I leave the sleeping squirrel on the branch, hoping it wouldn’t get eaten by my cat, scheming from the balcony; because contentment wouldn’t save it.

Part 1: You don't need a logo to start a business.

Why designing an identity before establishing meaning is…well…a waste of money

Contrary to popular assumption, most governments do not require a logo or letterhead to register a business. It’s not a legal requirement. A letterhead is a signifier of legitimacy and administrative readiness. It’s functional; designed to certify, not just circulate. Sometimes it requires one as part of the registration process. But a logo? Almost never.

And yet, it’s usually the first thing people ask me for.

Commercial stories evolve. They change shape. Look at Canon, from its first mark to what it is today. In 1933, the camera was called ‘Kwanon’; after the Buddhist deity of compassion. When they decided to go global, they dropped the goddess and registered the name ‘Canon.’ The meaning came first. The simplified logo came after the reputation was already understood.

Why do you think Canon simplified their mark… because they ran out of ideas?

I find that more logos get simplified because they have outgrown the need to explain themselves. The logo followed the business, not the other way around.

So when clients come to me at the early stages of launching, I usually recommend they don’t invest in a logo just yet. Better to invest in writing, photography, and above all, product development. A logo matters, but not for the reasons most people think, and rarely as early as they think it does.

Think of it as the lifespan of a reputation.

At some point in time, somewhere between the Louis Vuitton handbags and Nike caps, the logo became merchandise. And the meaning became equity. Now, a logo is only worth something once it’s earned a reputation or manufactured. More on that later…

It begins with the way you conduct business. The way it offers a solution, shows up, or maybe even simply listens to consumers. These gestures become the business story. And it evolves through repetition and trust. It becomes a reputation. And eventually, it crystallizes into form.

That’s when you invest in a logo… A good one, with all the bells and whistles.

Reputations are manufactured or grown.

Sometimes the entrepreneurs who hire us don’t have the luxury of time. They can’t grow a reputation organically; they need to inform and distribute within a short window. They need to manufacture one.

$6.9 billion reputation…

The Olympics spends hundreds of millions on branding every four years; an entirely new visual identity each cycle, built from scratch, designed to tell a story, about a city, a culture, a moment, etc.

Does it work? Does anyone ever buy a ticket for the logo alone?

Sometimes all you need to do is show up consistently.

Soorya Matchboxes, producing Sri Lanka’s first wax-coated safety matches since 1984; do they need to manufacture a new reputation each time?

Both approaches work. But only one of them requires a logo on day one. And they follow different timelines and different logics.

• A manufactured reputation, like the Olympics, a product launch, a rebrand, these are commissions. There is a clear brief, focused scope, and the goal post can’t move. High effort, high cost, concentrated into a short window. You get something finished. Something you can point to.

  
  

• A lived reputation, like Soorya didn’t commission their brand equity; they accumulated it. And the businesses that grow that way don’t usually need a single expensive solution. They need ongoing support.

  
  

That’s the model we’ve built our story studio membership around. We learn about our members, offering to help them package and distribute their stories consistently over time. Lower cost, higher value in the long run. In the end, they get a very good logo and everything else along the way.

They are mnemonic

Here’s a simple example: On your way home from work, you remember to buy some tea. You take it home, drink it. Turns out to be the best tea you’ve ever had. A few days later, you run out, go back to the shop and ask for the same one. The shopkeeper points to the shelf and says, ‘Over there, the box that says Zesta.’

Now you are a Zesta Tea person.

The logo didn’t create any experience. It just gave you a way back to it. That’s what a mnemonic does, it doesn’t build the memory, it retrieves one that already exists. The real value is in the association the mark holds. The logo doesn’t create that relationship. It inherits it.

A mnemonic only works when there’s already something to remember.

JK Keller took a self-portrait every single day for 25 years, from age 22 to 47. At a glance, it’s an archive; Then think about the relationship between himself, his practice, and an audience that watched him become something over time. That’s where the real value lives. It’s not in the mark itself, but in the accumulated trust it signifies. The logo doesn’t create that relationship. It inherits it.

Part 2 up next…

This text is an interpretation of a 2026 seminar on the lifespan of commercial stories, delivered for the Academy of Design, Sri Lanka. The seminar was designed to help understand how meaning is seeded, scaled, and sustained. It encourages design for continuity, not just aesthetics; for symbols that circulate, not just certify. So if you’re building something, start with consistency: consistency in product or service, or in story. Show up and let the reputation accumulate until the symbol has something worth inheriting.

The stories we tell in moments of crisis

A story that’s not relevant to the audience might as well not be told.

Building relevance is finding where a story belongs in the moment it is released, and whether it respects the emotional weather its audience is currently living through. When a major event shifts the collective mindset, we often reshape stories to meet it. Stories do not exist in isolation; they exist inside time, place, and shared experience. When the ground moves, socially, politically, and environmentally, stories that ignore that movement risk feeling hollow, performative, or worse, indifferent.

When Sri Lanka was shaken up by the disaster of Cyclone Ditwah, several stories being produced in our studio for the island's audiences were paused and carefully reconsidered to assess whether they were appropriate, necessary, and true to the moment.

In situations like this, we talk to our clients to understand their genuine responses to the ongoing situation, and refer back to the values of their brand articulation framework before reshaping stories to be relevant, sensitive and respectful to what’s happening in the daily lives of their audience. This process is about maintaining honesty and sensitivity in stories, and the willingness to sit with uncertainty rather than rush to fill silence.

For some businesses, the stories were a direct channel to support relief efforts and offer solidarity. Our role as story makers was to extract their genuine sentiments and efforts and bring them into story formats that matched their most successful communication platforms; seen in this example is one such story made to call for relief support through Instagram. It channelled Black Cat's Caregiver and Lover archetypal persona.

In the aftermath of Cyclone Ditwah in Sri Lanka, we reshaped or completely restructured planned stories to imbue sensitivity, relief efforts and helpful insight into the stories of client businesses; to give shape to their grief, empathy, and solidarity through stories, while staying true to their voice and values. This didn’t mean turning every story into commentary or every business into a spokesperson. Stories can acknowledge loss without exploiting it. They can offer support without centering themselves. They can point toward relief, resources, or collective care without pretending to be heroes. Stories should be genuine acts of participation rather than declarations.

Often, this means slowing down production, stripping stories back to their core intention, and asking what role, if any, they should play right now. Sometimes the answer is to offer support, relief, or insight. Sometimes it is to step aside altogether. And yes, this process costs us extra in production time, but we’d rather do more for better stories than maintain strict build cycles for so-so outcomes.

In some cases, it was about offering insight; in Rithihi's case, being a brand with a dominant Sage archetype, offering insight into the culture of giving was a genuine response that stemmed from the business itself. We only create the longform stories for the Rithihi blog, while their in-house team handles the blog formatting and what's published on social media. But, we always offer capsule versions of the longform stories designed by us, to point their audience to the blog; like this one.

Being able to express, connect, and mobilize is important for entrepreneurs and businesses in moments of collective crisis. Not because businesses must suddenly become moral authorities, but because they are part of the social fabric. They employ people, serve communities, and operate within shared systems that are also affected by disruption. This is because the work they do always starts as a response to the society and the world they inhabit. No business is created in a vacuum. Products, services, and ideas emerge from specific needs, tensions, and cultural conditions. When those conditions change, responding thoughtfully is not a deviation from the work; it’s a continuation of it.

That’s what makes responding to the realities of our world an extension of the work of a business; it’s not CSR, it’s not charity, nor is it being exceptional. It is simply being alive and responsive to the world a business shares with its audience. Responsiveness is not about virtue-signalling; it is about relevance, respect, and responsibility.

Stories that a business tells are a big part of these living, real, and relevant conversations that it has with its audience. Stories are where values become visible, where intent is tested against reality, and where trust is either strengthened or eroded.