Issue #47: Forget chasing happiness – why 'content' is good enough for me

In praise of feeling good right now.

‘Are you happy?’

‘Well… I’m content.’

My friend and I were walking up Primrose Hill, having a long overdue but eager-awaited catch-up. In a bid to make up for lost time, we’d skipped the ‘How are yous’ and gone full-blown existential. When she asked me if I was happy, though, my instinctive answer – content – was surprising (to me, at least). Little has changed, headline-wise, in my life over the past year or so. No major personal or professional updates. I’ve stayed still.

I could describe that stillness, less generously: as ‘stagnation’. And yet, that’s not how I perceive it. Surveying my life from this stable perch, I’ve felt myself valuing what I have more and more. The career I’ve built where I get to write, to be curious and to have interesting conversations. The family and friends who’ve remained a constant. I’m not chronically looking to reinvent myself, as I was in my twenties. I’ve more or less figured out how I like to live, exercise, dress, socialise etc (typically, the simpler the better). It’s that feeling of instinctively walking into your local Tesco Express as you pass it on the high street, then realising, I don’t actually need anything.

Meanwhile, with the benefit of time and solitude, I’m leaning into the quieter, nerdier version of myself: finding more time to read fiction, to explore different corners of London, to keep up with the same extracurriculars (yoga, learning Spanish) I took up a couple of years ago: motivated by curiosity, rather than urgency or perceived inadequacy. 

I’m in the wrong place and time to feel content. If you’re seeking contentment, London, one of the world’s major cities, isn’t the most obvious place to find it. In one of the world’s major capital cities, the keynote is aspiration: it’s why people walk so fast, why the skyscrapers reach up so high. I guess the thing that unites many of those who move to London – see also most major capital cities – is an underlying sense of discontentment; of wanting more.

I’m also a woman in her early thirties. Surely, if I wanted to coast for a bit, I should have done so in my twenties, or else saved it for retirement. I know the things I should be striving for right now. It’s not that I’m not looking for those things – I am – it’s just that I don’t think they will make me more or less happy than I am currently. At best, they will offer a different version of contentment, perhaps with a noisier soundtrack, fewer location changes and a host of new characters. 

They say comparison is the thief of joy, but I’ve found it can be the bringer of contentment too.