In 2014, researcher and founder of the Contentment Foundation Daniel Cordaro, took a team of researchers to the remote area of the Himalayas in Eastern Bhutan. Their research subjects were a group of 200 nomad families with which no outsider had previously contacted. It was to be the final look into a 5-year, cross-cultural study of how people identify and react to a long list of emotions. Upon showing the villagers dozens of facial and vocal expressions, even having been cut off from the rest of the world, they recognized the vast majority of emotions with accuracy. However, it was one emotion that elicited a different response to the norm. That emotion was contentment. Their guide, Dr. Dorji Wangchuk, stopped for a moment when they reached that word.
“In our culture, this emotion is very special. It is the highest achievement of human well-being, and it is what the greatest enlightened masters have been writing about for thousands for years. It’s hard to translate it exactly, but the closest word is chokkshay, which is a very deep and spiritual word that means ‘the knowledge of enough.’ It basically means that right here, right now, everything is perfect as it is, regardless of what you are experiencing outside.”
This explanation by Dr. Wangchuk brought chills to Cordaro who goes on to say in his story of this experience, “No matter where I went on planet earth, all of the cultures I interacted with revered contentment as one of the highest states to cultivate in life. Yet in the West, we were obsessing about happiness—and feeling more anxious, depressed, and stressed.”*
While Mr. Cardaro may have decided through his research that “happiness” rather than contentment is a relatively new goal which rears its head mainly in western society, I would argue it’s actually been around for a very long time. You only need to turn to Ecclesiastes 6, indeed much of Ecclesiastes itself, to see pleasure seeking or happiness sits atop many people’s motivation in life.
"If a man fathers a hundred children and lives many years, so that the days of his years are many, but his soul is not satisfied with life's good things, and he also has no burial, I say that a stillborn child is better off than he…even if he lives a thousand years twice over but fails to enjoy his prosperity. Do not all go to the same place?" Ecclesiastes 6:3 & 6
King Solomon would relate to this prosperous man; it might even be a reflection of the King himself. A man who gathered riches, property, wives, children, slaves, food and wine with abandon. Yet was drawn to study the meaningless life. A life much the opposite of those Himalayan nomads.
A 2016 survey by YouGov asked Americans whether they would rather achieve great things or be happy. 81% said they would rather be happy. Despite the universalness of happiness as a goal, it was hard to know how to define it or how to achieve it.** And I ask you, on a daily basis are you seeking happiness or contentment? Are you seeking to feel the emotion that pleasure provides or resting in the peace of enjoying “enough?”
"Better what the eye sees than the roving of the appetite. This too is meaningless, a chasing after the wind." Ecclesiastes 6:9
The “I need to do and seek out what makes me happy” hasn’t really worked out that well for us humans. It’s a life led by self-fulfillment and fleeting emotions. Back a few years when I decided to seek happiness, I went about it working hard at changing myself. I needed to be less, I suppose, like me and more like people who appeared happy with loads of friends. The problem was I was still me. I was still filled with sinful thoughts and behaviors, most of which I couldn’t see or didn’t want to.
"You desire but do not have, so you kill. You covet but you cannot get what you want, so you quarrel and fight. You do not have because you do not ask God. 3When you ask, you do not receive, because you ask with wrong motives, that you may spend what you get on your pleasures." James 4:2-3
Through study of God’s Holy Word, I finally had my “ah ha moment.” I was seeking with the wrong motive. What I needed to seek was joy and contentment, not how to be happy. Why? Because desiring happiness didn’t mean to love others, rather just myself. It meant getting what I wanted, not what God wanted of me. It led me to covet and be jealous of those who seemed “happier.”
In the late 1800s, Russian author Leo Tolstoy experienced his own profound revelation when seeking the meaningful life. Born to aristocrats, he had all that wealth could provide. He ran in highly intellectual circles debating the politics and issues of the day. And for all that upper-class privilege he once stated,
My life came to a standstill. I could breathe, eat, drink, and sleep, and I could not help doing these things; but there was no life, for there were no wishes the fulfillment of which I could consider reasonable… had a fairy come and offered to fulfill my desires I should not have known what to ask.”
In the course of events Tolstoy became involved with a group of Russian peasants. What he witnessed was a hard life. One with heavy, daily labor. And they were content. They, he said, knew the meaning of life and death and labored quietly. They endured deprivations and suffering. They lived and died seeing the good.
So how do we achieve this state of contentment? Must we cast off all our hard earned wealth? Sell our homes and become Himalayan nomads? Become like John the Baptist and wear rough clothing and eat bugs?
Enjoying life is a matter of character, not circumstance.
Booker T. Washington
Like so many lessons gifted by God, the hard won path to contentment is not about our outward appearance. If it were, the successful business person would be doomed. Yet success, from a wealth perspective, is not seen in the Bible as something to be disabused. It is only seen as causing potential difficulty for the believer. It wasn’t the prince’s wealth that caused him not to be able to follow Jesus. But rather his clinging to it for his happiness. (Matt 19:21-22). His character was filled with greed and pride.
In the completed study by Cordaro he found there were two views of what people think makes for a contented life. The first he called the “More Strategy.” It’s that view of the western happiness mindset. More money, more stuff. The problem, he found, was once you got more, that feeling of happiness drifted away like the mist.
The second approach is the “Enough Strategy.” It’s when people look inward to find the happiness. He poured through thousands of years of ancient wisdom traditions and found that the ancients almost never used the word happiness. More than 90 percent of the time, they used the word contentment, and described it as a state of “unconditional wholeness,” regardless of what is happening externally.
The unfortunate diagnosis by Cordaro however, is that somehow we can become whole all by ourselves. It’s the same mindset of modern, secular psychology and 1,000s of self-help books, He didn’t research which ancient wisdom traditions were successful at this goal and how. If he had, he might have discovered Jesus.
Enjoying The Enough Life Part Two now available! Click here.
*Excerpt from Greater Good Magazine, May 27, 2020 What If You Pursue Contentment Rather Than Happiness?
** BBC’s Nat Rutherford
