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.