Contentment

Right so recently I had this sort of debate with a friend whether one can really be truly content. Sure ideological contentment would lead to happiness, as you would be happy with everything.

But in reality we see that nobody is ever truly content. People always want striving for something more or trying to achieve something. This is just the way humans function. All these years of progress would be non-existent had everyone just been content with what they had. People would almost lose their desire to live if there was nothing more to actually attain. Existance would seem pretty pointless. What would be our purpose if there was nothing more left for us to do and we were content with everything.

Yet this very desire to always want more and improve things does tend to cause unhappiness. We seem to at times create need for things which are really unnecessary, for example the megapixel race (people tend to want cameras with the largest amount of megapixels, even though for most people having anything more than 5 megapixels is utterly pointless as they would never notice the difference). People never seem to have enough, and always want more. They always have high expectations from things, and when this happens it just leads to disappointment.

So does this mean that we have just doomed ourselves to unhappiness. Well this is not entirely true. We just have to learn to be content with the fact that we will never be truly content (bit of a paradox there...LOL). Oh well...I guess in reality we just need to be find the right balance between wanting more and being content. (Its all about the right balance...as my first post states http://kewsvnet.blogspot.com/2009/01/balance.html)