Delphic Maxim 133: Do not be discontented by life
I’ve set myself the challenge of responding to each of the Delphic Maxims for 15 minutes a day.
133. Do not be discontented by life
Sometimes I wonder why it is that I am so happy and content with my life. I look around me and I see people always wanting more, never being satisfied, running to make ends meet. I see ambition — and that’s not to say that I am not ambitious — but I see ambition that can consume people and I wonder why people let themselves boil over with frustration. Not everyone, but a lot of people. So many people with a life of relative privilege, advantage and comfort, and yet so many people seem to be discontented.
You can read about it in the papers all the time. Today Boris Johnson became Prime Minister of the UK, a man who just seems woefully unqualified to hold that position. He seemed to surf into office on a wave of discontentment — the same wave that installed Trump, that drives a sense of unhappiness and dissatisfaction. The answer on both sides of politics seems to be to double down on the sense that life is bad, that there’s nothing worth being contented about, that we have to fix these phantom problems before we can make life better.
I know a big part of it is that I’ve lived a fairly privileged life. I’ve never wanted anything, the dumb choices I’ve made — decisions that I regret, but things that I wouldn’t take back because they’re character-forming — those were my choices, and I still manage to bounce back from even the worst of them. I’ve got a social safety net of family and friends, and a stable government in a wealthy country, all of which are there to catch me. My friends have that too.
Not everyone does, of course. There are plenty of people who are left behind: the stable system of checks and balances in rich countries tends to work out to the advantage of the rich. The poorer a person is, the less likely the system is to give them a lift up. I think that’s getting worse, and in large part it isn’t because there are more poor people or they are getting poorer, but actually because the discontentment of wealthier people is keeping that safety net frozen in time. It needs to expand in order to keep up with the expense that comes with increased quality of life. Funny that: so many of us are better off, but we’re more discontented than ever, and that discontentment gets taken out on the people with the least.
Maybe one of the reasons I’ve always been happy with life is because the lessons of my favourite books stuck with me from a young age. Jostein Gaarder is a beautiful philosopher, and it was The Solitaire Mystery (still my favourite book of all time, ever since I was around eight years old) that first taught me about the Oracle at Delphi. And it also taught me that life is an incredible, lucky accident — that it takes millions of years to make a human being, and that it’s pretty spectacular to live on this perfect rock hurtling through space that just by chance can sustain life, and just by chance the series of serendipitous biological accidents and geological movements of the earth created the climate to create humans, and just by chance so many of those humans met, and fell in love, and led to me.
That’s actually a universal experience of good fortune that every human can be thankful for — unless existence itself is something with which people are discontented (perhaps they are, I never claimed to speak for everybody).
You hear it just as often as you hear rich people complain about not having enough: people with very little are often the most content. The happiest country in the world is supposedly Bhutan — and they aren’t as loaded up with the frills and trinkets of the wealthy West. I suppose it would have something to do with those virtues that Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Epicurus, Cicero and so many others thought made life worth living: friendship and an examined life.
Today’s maxim is for people with the relative privilege that leads them to read a series of blogs about Delphic Maxims by a random librarian who lives in Sydney. Life is pretty bloody good — it can be frustrating, it can seem unfair, but in the main it is good. Don’t be discontented with it!
