Don't Settle For Content

What does it mean to be content? My own contentment, I realized, was a luxury of human evolution and a mechanized mastery of survival. My contentment was a poor consolation for the abandoned dreams of my youth. Don’t settle for contentment. As George Eliot once said, “It’s never too late to be what you might have been.”

Over the last 10,000 years, we humans have pretty much cornered the market on survival. Ever since our ancestors abandoned their hunter gatherer ways and adopted an agrarian life, we’ve had time to invent novel methods of ensuring a steady supply of our basic needs.

Further ingenuity brought us various levels of automation, leading to industrialization and mass production. The life sustaining staples that had once consumed our time, they had become available on demand. With our success and relative comfort, our populations grew. With our basic needs now met in abundance, our focus turned to other areas. Medicines were developed. Galaxies were discovered. Energy became an accessible resource. Life took on a whole new meaning.

People were living longer, and with longevity came more and more time to conceive and ponder life’s big questions. Our purpose shifted from mere survival to a quest towards enlightenment. Continued advancements in technology eventually enabled us to live comfortably immersed in philosophical thought. Life now required minimal physical exertion. When our brains grew tired, we escaped through all of the evolving mediums of entertainment. We found meaning and identity there. The story of the human experience is a story of connection, of shared emotional understanding. How we relate to others begins with how we relate to ourselves. The stability we now coveted was part of a social construct broadcast daily through mainstream channels.

With this newfound need came a host of new stigmas, new anxieties, and new fears. In taking frequent stock of our lives, we could not help but compare our humble lot with that of others’. The selfishness such comparison bred was inversely proportionate to the quality of our values. We would not have made such great evolutionary strides without a mentality that was accompanied by a communal values system. Those values were directly related to our society’s fears, which in the beginning were centered around the immediate need for resources to survive. Survival was once a full-time vocation.

Today’s culture breeds an entirely new set of shared values that are directly related to our internal needs. Our fears have changed since the days our ancestors spent sunrise to sunset in search of food and shelter. Our ancestors’ fears were instinctual, and rooted in the physical world. Since then, our physical world has been supplanted by an internal one. The threats we now perceive are born in our psyche, the result of an existence now wholly consumed by a hard-wired devotion to mainstream validation and approval. Free time is now an enemy of progress for most, rather than a conduit for growth and learning.

Evolution and ingenuity now enable us to run circles around a once urgent and daily struggle for our basic needs. Our mastery of survival now gives us time for passive social interaction, which over time has come to dominate our conscience. Inevitably, fears crop up. We may have money in the bank, food in the fridge, but our minds are consumed by a penetrating fear of rejection, failure, and abandonment.

On a side note, I believe we are born into this world in fear. Fear is the first emotion we ever feel. Coming out into the light, wide eyed and bare skinned, raw and vulnerable to even the slightest sound or touch.

But, I digress.

So here we are, masters of the universe, titans of evolution, God’s perfect creation guided by instincts and values instilled in such a passive way we are oblivious to their origin. Our Constitution instructs our freedom, and we are lucky to have it. We have grown accustomed to a pace of existence framed by a rewards system that endorses instant gratification. In between these steady shots of dopamine, we have settled into a normative existence defined by an aforementioned word. We have grown reluctantly content. We rise in the morning, drink our coffee, kiss our partners goodbye, and go to work. We trade the best 8 hours of the day for just enough money to get us by. We come home from work each day in order to eat an unhealthy meal in front of the television. We will not move again until it’s time for bed. We will repeat the same routine, day in and day out, until we either wake up or die.

At times, we feel an itch that needs scratching. But, why bother? We’re reluctantly content. Risk is only a byproduct of desperation. We are no longer desperate for our needs. Risk is for the bridge and tunnel crowd who specialize in burning their candles at both ends. We’re not desperate. Again, we’re content. Our ancestors took risks so we wouldn’t have to. Our country was founded by risk takers.

I was once a victim of the same contentment. It was a powerful form of contentment. It resigned me daily to an indifferent work life. It was a contentment that had me so exhausted by day’s end I spent my free time escaping reality with the help of an enormous flat screen TV. Instead of using my free time to pursue my passions, I let the fear I was born with keep me passively content with my surroundings.

I used to feel that itch all the time. But it slowly got less and less frequent, until passion and enthusiasm were extinguished entirely by a quasi-form of satisfaction that told me I could relax into a flatlined routine of existence that would have had my ancestors checking for a pulse.

Again, I’m not telling you to do anything. Most of the world is resigned to some form of passive existence and they are doing just fine. Work is enough. Family is enough. Love is enough. We can’t all be entrepreneurs or inventors, business owners or wilderness survival experts. We can’t all pursue love and knowledge and connection and spirituality with fearless devotion and a precious understanding of time.

But shouldn’t our freedom have more meaning? What’s hindering our ambition, and holding up our motivation to explore it with enthusiasm? Many of us have arrived at some passive point in our lives where our own dreams are only realized 60 minutes at a time, as we watch them played out for us by actors on a small screen that has become a primary portal to our otherwise pacified ambitions. We have been worn down to a point where we have adopted a reluctant contentment with our lives.

I’m not telling you to do anything. I’m just telling you not to settle for contentment. Where do you want to be five years from now? Can you visualize it in your mind? What will it take to get there? What is holding you back?

Don’t be content with your life. Aspire for more. If you are ready to stretch yourself, to live fearlessly in passionate pursuit of what until now has lingered seemingly out of reach, start talking about it. Talk about that first step. Where will it take you? What will you do today, and tomorrow, to ensure you talk about it some more.

Some of you may not be ready. That’s ok. Just don’t rest on your laurels for too long. Fear of failure grounds 99% of ambition before it even takes flight. All we can do is succeed at being immersed in positive action for the time being, until the day our most impossible dream is realized and we come to discover it was more about the journey than the destination this whole time.