Wednesday, September 21, 2011

Contentment vs. Happiness

There's a difference between happiness and contentment, isn't there? If the difference is what I think it is, then contentment might just be the answer to a satisfying life.

Contentment is less flamboyant than happiness. Happiness is a firework-pop of color and wonder. Happiness is a plunge on a sled. Happiness is a flood of endorphins that gets recognized for its intensity of pleasure. But contentment is a hot cup of coffee, slowly enjoyed; it's floating down a gentle stream on a raft, on one's back, watching overhead branches brush past the clouds. Contentment is a state of being, while happiness is more of an event. Happiness, as a more intense thing, can't really be sustained, but contentment can be.

Isn't it, then, contentment we are after, rather than happiness? (That is, if you buy my semantics, here.) The thing is, we want it to last. Most of us would rather remain content than dot out lives with periods of explosive joy. We want to find a "zone" and stay in it.

If this is true, we ought to search our experiences for moments of contentment and then extrapolate from those moments a way to reproduce that feeling on a long-term basis, it seems to me. We can interpret who we are from those events and, consequently, what we need in order to remain content.

My most vivid memory of contentment takes me back to a summer night in graduate school. I was reading for my comprehensive literature exam to come in the fall. It was about one o'clock in the morning. Everyone in the house was asleep and so was the neighborhood around me. A cool breeze billowed the curtains of my room. Occasionally I would drop the book to my lap and just enjoy the silence and the scent of the rich air. I was content.

Another memory goes back farther -- when I was younger -- in my early teens. The night was similar: late, warm. I remember sitting at my dark wooden desk working on building a model of a battleship. Next to me was a tiny television. It was black-and-white and I was watching, in between gluing pieces together, Peter Cushing's incarnation of Sherlock Holmes in The Hound of the Baskervilles. That night, too, I felt at peace -- content; at one with the world.

I have many other memories like that -- including pretending for hours, alone, as a little boy, that my back yard was a desert island and that I was "surviving" -- but what they all have in common is that I was alone and I was doing something creative or intellectual.

Contentment is one's foundation. While I love being with friends and family, my base is solitude. It is what I use to put myself to rights before I need to deal with others, for good or ill. A lot of things make me happy, but only the combination of solitude and creativity make me content. So, I fill my life with as much of that as possible.

Maybe shifting perspective from happiness to contentment would calm the waters of tumultuous lives. We can soothe our troubled souls with a retreat into whatever it is that centers us. When I am playing with my band, in a loud, crowded environment, for instance, I often go out to my car between sets and spend the break in silence. I walk back in feeling better. That's a decent microcosm, I think.

Contentment is decompression of a kind, and we all need that.


  1. I so thoroughly agree that contentment is what we should seek, not happiness, since the latter is a fleeting sensation and the former is, as you say, a state of being.

    I don't have so much to add to this except that this post added even more cool points to you and your blog. The way you framed the conversation makes the topic, which is more intellectual than it should be, accessible. I feel like I could read this to my students and they'd understand the difference between being happy and content, that trying to be happy isn't necessarily going to satisfy them as much.

    I'm also a solitary type, though I love my friends and the time I spend with them dearly. I form myself in solitude, give shape to my being.

    ~ Matt

  2. Good.Although I have no idea what it means...sorry.But I still love ya [you really.]

    Love,Joseph Matarazzo

  3. Thanks, Matt. You certainly have my permission to use my blog for teaching, if you see fit. I would be interested to hear what the kids think. Do you teach high school? I've often thought assigning kids to comment on a blog would be interesting, but I'm not enough of an egomaniac to require rthem to read my own.

  4. Dear Joe -- Meh, you're nine years old. You might not understand this, but you sure do practice it yourself. If only we grown ups could understand contentment as well as you kids do. Love you too, Pal.


  5. I agree, except I'm not sure happiness is explosions of intense pleasure - I think that's joy. In my experience, if you're lucky, you exist in a state of background happiness, but within that or overlaying it can be irritation, anxiety et cetera, like mist over an essentially lovely landscape; it's when contentment and happiness are combined, as sometimes happens, in situations like those you mention, but also, for me, sometimes beside a fire somewhere with friends, that all is really extremely well with the world - at least for me.

  6. Ah coincidence - just after reading your post here, I read this poem by Edward Thomas on the lovely First Known when Lost blog (see the last verse -
    "For these I ask not, but, neither too late
    Nor yet too early, for what men call content,
    And also that something may be sent
    To be contented with, I ask of fate."

  7. I remember a piece along these lines in Harper's about 1983. It was one of the short pieces in the front of the magazine, and I believe that the writer was European. Wish I could remember more, but it has been a while.

  8. Z -- It's true that everyone's version of contentment is different. And there are certainly moments of memororable contentment; maybe those are the ones where happiness and contentment overlap, as you say. you;re not as weird as I am, though. Your contentment contains people. [sighs]

    George -- I often write these things and, just before I click "publish" I think: "Someone HAS to have said this before." There it is,I suppose. If you ever do remember the article, I'd be interested to read it. Good to hear from you again.

  9. Great read! Totally agree with you on the difference between contentment and happiness. I read quite a few blogs since I was searching for this answer. One of the bloggers compared contentment and happiness to smile and laughter, contentment being more akin to smile, and happiness to laughter. The idea being, one can smile on one's own when one is devoid of paid, laughter requires one to hear a joke. So happiness requires input from the outside while contentment comes from inside alone. Nice ideas.

    There's the blog I am talking about. Readers might like it, too...

    What Is the Difference Between Happiness and Contentment?

    1. Hi, Jack -- thanks for stopping by. Some interesting ideas -- I like the smile/laugh metaphor a lot.

      A lot of people seem to find this post in searching "contentment vs. happiness." Certainly a telling clue to a philosophical question for the age!

      Thanks again -- hope to hear from you again.