Post #91: Discontentment

12 Feb. 2024

“God grant me the courage to change what can be changed, the serenity to accept what cannot be altered, and the wisdom to know the one from the other.”

—Reinhold Niebuhr’s original version of the Serenity Prayer

     Nobody enjoys feeling discontented—at least not when it is, confessedly, about one’s own unsatisfying circumstances, or worse still, about one’s personal inadequacies and missteps.

     Discontentment with the world at large can, at times, be more appealing, particularly to intellectual types. Yet it may look even more unavailing, even futile and presumptuous, considering the scale of the complaint; for what do we really know of the moral workings of the universe, we who barely understand our own? Perhaps these gripes can be made to appear a little more reasonable when they are understood as protests against our blatantly imperfect world being presented as the alleged product of a perfect divine benevolence and omnipotence. Buddhists are not so encumbered by their cosmology, however, and anyway, even here, as in Albert Camus’s orgy of shaking fists at the gods in one existential act of defiance after another (in his Myth of Sisyphus), it gets tedious quickly, especially if one does not carry in one’s baggage the revolutionary conceits that commonly afflict the French intelligentsia, and the endless glamorization of futile and ineffective gestures of resistance meant to palliate, somehow, the crushing defeat of 1940 and its Vichy aftermath.*

     Next, at a much lower metaphysical altitude, but to far greater and noisier daily effect, we have the ringing discontents around the countless faults of this or that social order. These are immensely gratifying, no doubt, to the self-appointed arbiters and would-be enforcers of social justice, coming as they do with rich helpings of righteous indignation and a most delectable sense of superiority over the moral imbeciles on the other side. Alas, it is so very easy to find fault with others in this manner and blame on them all the ills of the world. It is much harder to focus honestly on one’s own failings and shortcomings, and most difficult of all to do something about them without blaming anyone.

     The ignorant blame others, Epictetus teaches in his Enchiridion (par. 5); those who have made some progress blame themselves; but the wise blame nobody. For the Stoics (see my upcoming post, #92) as for the Buddhists, everything depends on this redirection from our native impulse to throw stones at others to making the urgently needed repairs on the glass houses we all inhabit. Accepting this responsibility, and doing so without reservation, is where our liberation is to be found; if we were all to direct out energies towards it more consistently, the world would be improved beyond recognition without any need to point fingers at others whose actions are anyway largely beyond our control.

     Which brings us back to the question of discontentment—not with the world, and not with others, but with our own selves and the circumstances we have made for ourselves. At the peaks of the practice, we might imagine that such discontents should disappear into thin air: the Stoic sage blames nobody, we’ve heard, not even himself, nor does the liberated Buddhist. Which is all very well for such accomplished practitioners and saintly beings, one might retort, but what about the rest of us? Where does it leave us?

     Along with physical pain and fear, our discontents look like a third major bane in an unholy trinity of human misery. I have discussed before (#8 and #17) how our usual accounts of “negative” emotions may need to be supplemented with a bit of appreciation, at least, on account of the part they play in keeping us out of harm’s way, and alive. It may be tempting, and perhaps even true, to say that in the absence of all discontent, suffering would lose much of its hold on us. Dukkha is, after all, nothing but dissatisfaction in all its myriad forms, and perhaps that can be overcome precisely by a depth of acceptance than chases all our discontents away. Mission accomplished. Game over.

     It may be so; but again, I wonder. As pain will prompt us to respond quickly to dangers that we might otherwise neglect, and as fear makes us take potentially life-saving precautions, so discontentment too has a function that is perhaps not to be dismissed quite so quickly. Wretched as it makes us feel, is it not an indispensable spur to growth and development? If we were never discontented, why would we strive to improve our circumstances, or those of others, or our very selves? That we already are, all of us, as we should be, can only be taken half-seriously, surely—as wishful thinking at best, if not blatant self-deceit, a soothing lie we may tell ourselves and others sometimes, but that none of us truly believe.

     Not that much would be gained if contemplation of our own inadequacies and shortcomings led us into paroxysms of self-disgust, self-contempt, or even self-loathing. But loving-kindness in the Buddhist sense should set a limit to such downward spirals: it is not limited to others only, but should include oneself just as well. Love others as you do yourself, counsel the Old and New Testaments alike; it is not a matter of only caring about others, but about relating to the world in general in more loving ways. But does such love, all-encompassing as it is meant to be, really preclude all manner of discontent? Would it not be closer to the truth to say that if it were not for a certain discontentment with ourselves, that is, with our normally not very loving ways (to say nothing of truly universal loving-kindness), we would scarcely think of aspiring to such a high ideal?

     But there is no end, you might protest next, to such growth and development, any more than there is a natural limit to our desires! Fair enough, I grant that much, and it does make discontentment a most dangerous and double-edged sword. If you were to live by it all the time, you would die by it, not in the sense of perishing, but in that you would never have another happy day in your life, since nothing would ever be good enough. One improvement would merely be a stepping stone for demanding the next one of yourself, without respite and without end. So reasonable limits really do need to be set here, as with our desires, lest we make ourselves utterly miserable and end up driving ourselves mad. My point is obviously not to sing the praises of discontentment as a way of life (who would dream of such a thing?), but merely to suggest that it too has an important place in the economy of human life. We have our programming set to it for a reason: it has kept us in the game more reliably, over countless generations of ancestors who lived long enough to procreate successfully, than a more relaxed configuration would have done. There are ways to reprogram ourselves, and with good reason; but we should recognize how we came to be that way in the first place, and that without it we might not have comes so far at all.

     There is a balance to be struck, then, and it can be done variously. I myself may side with the Romans on their per aspera ad astra; others may wish to set a more easygoing pace and emphasize the contentment more. Still others might drive themselves much harder than I do, and dismiss me as a slacker. Truth may be one thing, but tastes and temperaments differ. Far be it from me to prescribe a formula to govern anyone’s scales in this matter; I am merely pointing out that we must all strike the balance somewhere. (It tends to shift with the years, especially in the second half of life, towards acceptance, or perhaps resignation; hence the surprisingly high levels of contentment reported by retirees in their sixties and beyond.) We are not only striving, self-improving creatures, but that side of our makeup strikes me as vital to our species nonetheless, even in those in whom it is perhaps less visible. The Buddha himself, had he not been such an extreme striver, willing to content himself with nothing short of complete enlightenment and full liberation, would not be the Buddha as we know him. The radiant, serene contentment for which he is celebrated was not the premise of his life, but its fruit; and so it probably needs to be for us too.

     The traditional story of the intense young man who, on the eve of his thirtieth birthday, walks out on his wife and newborn child, and thereby refuses the role at the head of his society for which he was intended (not really a prince, as he’s often been called, but still the son of a local tribal chieftain), deserves lingering over for a moment. It may be a stylized, embellished, or even altogether archetypal tale; but it is certainly not implausible. The way the freshly minted mendicant proceeds to meditate his way through the hierarchy of textbook stages, being along the way offered the leadership of two high-profile spiritual communities and declining both as not good enough—even if this had all been invented from scratch (which I do not believe to be the case), it would have been very well made up anyway. Se non è vero, è ben trovato.

     Of course it is equally important that the story did not end there, nor with the extreme mortifications that the not-yet Awakened One undertook next, very nearly proving the end of him. It all led, instead, to the Buddha’s budding realization that such extreme exertions are unnecessary and even unhelpful when compared to the much greater merits and promise of the middle way. Nonetheless, it is worth pondering how much the great discoveries of the famous night under the bodhi tree owed to earlier dissatisfactions en route, not by way of ultimate answers, of course, but by a kind of nagging spiritual hunger that could not be satiated except by going all the way. A noble discontentment, it may be; but discontentment nonetheless. That was a long time ago, you might object, before the Path was meticulously charted and marked with signposts from beginning to end. Fair enough. But even today, I daresay, no one ever signs up for ten days of silence and sensory deprivation out of sheer contentment with the state of his life.

*A neglected chapter in how the good people of France sought to recover their lost honor at the end of the war is the bestial treatment they meted out to countless thousands of “vertical collaborators,” that is to say, girls who had committed the unforgivable sin of getting too friendly with the German soldiers (young conscripts, for the most part; more hardened troops were deployed further East).