The Tao of the Content

25.
Single.
Ready to mingle.
At least not yet, anyway.
I know I skipped an entry last week in my effort to remain committed to watching back to back episodes of Sex and the City as I ate saltine crackers with butter on them. But for good reason. For research, potentially.
I wanted to know what it would be like to just take a week and do absolutely nothing outside of working. Meaning: No gym time, no cooking, no hanging out with people and maybe lots of online shopping. This all started when I decided to spend a lovely Saturday afternoon with my good friend, Val.

Our original plan, since we are both taking classes, was to do homework for a couple of hours. I brought some healthy veggie snacks to her house and we sat down with our laptops. And for four hours, we did nothing but not do our homework.
We sat on her couch doing absolutely nothing but talking about how miserable we felt about our lives and eating ice cream.
It was the best thing I had done in a long time.

You see, Val is the only friend I have who is my age and in the same exact place I'm in. We are both:
-Mid-twenties
-Single (and not wanting to be)
-looking for better opportunities for our careers (most women have either the career or the un-single life. We figure we may as well at least have the fabulous careers if we are going to be single for a while longer).
-still living with mom and dad (and not wanting to be. Because we can't afford to live elsewhere. This is where the whole career thing comes into play).

We vented to one another about how miserable we've been feeling. About how we just want a little more money, to lose a little more weight, and to be a little more loved by someone unrelated to us.
And that word. That little word that isn't supposed to pop up anywhere in the single woman's vocabulary kept on popping up in my head: UNHAPPY. It had somehow occurred to me that by standards put upon us by society, that we were unhappy.
According to society we should be out serial-dating, or having fabulous careers, buying ourselves fancy things, and drinking ourselves into an oblivion every once in a long while. Even people who are coupled up have this expectation that they need to constantly be happy, and I find it sickening.
It occurred to me also, that maybe this wasn't everyone's definition of being happy.
But sometimes happy isn't something we need to be. And maybe being happy isn't something we are supposed to feel all the time. Maybe being happy was just a temporary state, like a high, that we come crashing down from, and sometimes quite hard, into a state of unhappiness.
And maybe unhappiness isn't unhappiness at all. When you really think about it, and I mean really think about it, most people would say they are content with their lives. Not happy. Content. And that's how they feel most of the time, which is great. And then they get this brief glimpse of euphoria, whether for a second, or a minute, or a day or a month and then they come down from it, back to exactly what it was they were content with, mistaking it for unhappiness. . There is no separation of the two ideals. There is no clear distinction between the rise and the fall back down to the steady state that has always been. There is always a blurred line. Maybe happiness is the new designer drug?
As far as I am concerned, and as far as I have seen and learned, I don't think I'm unhappy. And, as Josh Radnor said in an interview with Rainn Wilson ( you can watch that here) "I would rather be content than happy." I would rather be considered constantly unhappy rather than go through the ups and downs of happiness. I would rather kill that addiction now and just be content.

Because there is absolutely nothing wrong with being content.