In Pursuit of Contentment
The West Australian
Ros Thomas
Published: Saturday August 4, 2012
Section: Opinion

What makes a contented life?

Almost everywhere I turn these days, I feel brainwashed into thinking I ought to be cheesed off with my lot. That I’m somehow entitled to a better life, that I deserve it because I’m worth it. L’Oreal style.

We are living in the age of entitlement, where the expectations of a luxury existence have filtered down from the uber-rich to the people next door until even a couple of teenage newlyweds expect a home theatre and a two car garage.

Am I so antiquated at 44 that I can remember saving up for things? That I’ve (finally) learnt that more often than not, my needs are usually just wants? That my instant gratification gene (handed down through generations of women) does not need to be instantly satiated. That waiting for the prize intensifies the pleasure of finally acquiring it.

It takes a concerted effort to examine our state of contentedness – we’re so switched on these days, there’s no pause button for reflection, no down time. If you’re not being pounded by emails and text messages, you’re being ear bashed by the phone. Surfing the internet means drowning in the bottomless deep of information and Facebook wants your wall papered with your every waking thought. No wonder our kids have trouble getting to sleep. The art of winding down after dinner with a good book or some music has been lost amongst the loungeroom invaders of television and home movies and the ever present news. (It takes a determined trigger finger to turn off the remote in our house.)

It’s not until you go on holiday that you reacquaint yourself with the small pleasures of quietness, of not pushing into the corners of every silence with comment or conversation. You don’t have to talk as much as you think. (Out loud. Or in the chambers of your mind.)

I blame the interweb for blurring the boundaries between the haves and the have nots, for spreading at warp speed the objects of desire until even my 11-year-old takes for granted he’s getting a Playstation 3 for his twelfth birthday. (He isn’t.) With the big day approaching, I feel some trepidation at knowing his disappointment will be hard to assuage, and when all his friends have one, I don’t blame him for feeling entitled to one as well. Unfortunately for him, his mother enjoys walking the tightrope of expectation and reward. And she thinks a Playstation is an instrument for future malcontent. (And to be quite frank, he and I don’t need any more electronic sources of conflict.)

I wonder if part of the problem is that for a good twenty years now, we’ve been constantly telling our kids they are special, and now they’re living the label and won’t have a bar of anyone who says otherwise. I hear stories of Generation Y and the younger Generation X’s, now in their 20’s and 30’s, expecting to climb their career ladders faster than anyone else, earn more than their mentors and oust their parents from their holiday houses on long weekends.

But does it make them happy knowing they are the most catered for generation in history? I doubt it. Perhaps all we’ve done is unwittingly create a breed of chronic malcontents, who can’t stand criticism and disappointment, and whose overinflated egos can’t handle the ugly realities of life. Like waiting until you’re 30 to get a BMW. From your parents.

Am I sounding too harsh? Oh dear. I too, tell my children they’re extraordinary. (Usually in the cherished sense.) But I’ve put the question of ‘what makes a contented life’ to a number of the more sensible members of our community, my mother’s generation, who, in their late 60’s and 70’s, have their arthritic fingers firmly on the pulse of what really matters. And from those whose somewhat impending denouement gives them clarity of mind and memory, comes the slice of wisdom that the fierce work ethic of their day has been overtaken by the relentless pursuit of self fulfillment.

Showing off your collected fixtures and fittings would have been bad manners in our grandparent’s day. War and the depression, poverty, unemployment, rations and later, the memories of it, left no room for discontent when luxuries were well out of reach. Perhaps then, happiness was as simple as a roast chicken on Sunday.

Today’s epidemic of narcissism is being studied by a research team from Kennesaw State University in Georgia, which has been examining the results of an annual survey of high school students dating back to 1975. They have concluded that the younger generations want maximum income and maximum time off, two seemingly incompatible pursuits.

Surely one comes at the expense of the other? But trying to have it all is pointless and for most, it doesn’t work. It just causes burnout. Not contentedness.

The older generation also knows the gift of self-sacrifice is undervalued these days. I think fewer young people today think of giving of themselves without expecting some reward in return. They don’t call it the ‘me’ generation for nothing : blinded by the accumulation of material possessions, the outward trappings of a so-called successful life, it’s about what’s on show, not what’s been achieved privately without public acknowledgement. I think giving something for nothing is a lovely recipe for content.

My better half gives me plenty of stick and gets nothing in return. Just my stony-faced silence. Which he quite likes. (The silence part.) He has a rule-of-relationships that you mustn’t bicker over trifles, and you can’t sulk about them either. You need to get your grievances out in one hit, without shouting, agree with his point of view, apologise for yours and move on. He is infuriating but one of the most contented people I have ever met. Is he onto something? Not sweating the small stuff and always being right? I try in vain.

Sometimes, when the dishes aren’t pressing, and dinner is in the oven, I sit outside and watch my children at play. In that brief window before tea time when they’re happily going about their business with a watering can or two rocks and a leaf, I feel content. Content with the healthy little family I have produced, content that I am able to stop still and watch a fleeting vignette of childhood, content that they are absentmindedly content.

And then drifting over the smell of roses comes the smell of burning casserole, and I awake from my Madonna and child torpor to the reality of domestic discontentedness. It pierces the air with its high-pitched shrieks of sibling rivalry as middle child yells ‘What’s for dinner?’ And I proudly yell back that I’ve cooked a beef bourgignon to remind us all of our once-in-a-lifetime trip to France. And he looks at me and says ‘ugh’. Content indeed.