Envy and Contentment

Envy of other people’s lives and dissatisfaction with our own is probably at an all-time high in our culture.  There have always been class distinctions or economic disparities that cause some people to think they would have a better life with more money or a higher class.  But now the dissatisfaction spreads across all demographics, provoked by social media and celebrity culture.  Social media often creates a false, curated image of a person’s life, leading to discontent for scrollers.  And celebrity culture celebrates anyone who’s famous for anything, leading to feelings of inferiority and failure for regular people who don’t have followers. 

There’s a wonderful passage in Wendell Berry’s book, Hannah Coulter, where Hannah realizes “The chance you had is the life you’ve got.”  There’s no good to be had in wishing you had had a different or better chance in life.  She concedes that “You can make complaints about what people, including you, make of their lives after they’ve got them,” but “you mustn’t wish for another life.  You mustn’t want to be somebody else.”

Maybe we know this, but it’s still hard to convince our brains and our hearts of this truth.  Feeling contentment and living it out is a challenge in a  free enterprise culture that runs on competition.  We are at an epidemic rate of anxiety, and it was already there before Covid.  Depression is literally killing us, here in this first world affluence and ease.

Hannah gives us the solution.  She says, “What you must do is this: ‘Rejoice evermore.  Pray without ceasing.  In everything, give thanks.’ I am not all the way capable of so much, but those are the right instructions.”

Those instructions Hannah is confident of are straight from God in 1 Thessalonians 5:16-18. And even though she may have trouble actually doing those things, as she says, she knows it’s the right thing, the solution.  

Contentment comes when we find things to rejoice over, when we pray about the things that aren’t right in the world, and when we give thanks for what IS good no matter what is wrong.