Is it good to always be content, or is it good to not be content so as to strive to better yourself or the lives of others? Always be content, but still strive on diligently, mindfully, with wisdom, to better yourself, and the universe. I believe it’s healthy to always be content with the present moment. This means that no matter what changes may take place in your life, which come to you through your conscious understanding, you will be content with the fact that the present is good enough. This doesn’t mean you won’t rise up against injustice, strive to help others, or try to better yourself. It means that in the process of doing these things, you will remain peaceful and calm, controlled and not chaotic. It seems like wisdom is the only answer to most questions. You can recognize something is not good, or be unhappy, or dislike something that is happening, while remaining content and accepting of reality as it is in the present moment. This doesn’t mean you quit attempting to solve problems because the present is good enough, it means you pursue them with wisdom, attempt to be virtuous, and whether you succeed or fail you remain equanimous and content with the result, always learning something new from the experience, then move on. It is this process of wisdom in testing and displaying virtue that naturally cultivates contentment and peace. Having few desires is crucial to this concept.

You should do what is right always, and if your present situation is one of much physical pain, or psychological suffering, or someone you care about is in these situations, the wise thing to do is not to be content with it and not react, but be accepting of reality for what it is, analyze what you can do to better the situation, then act accordingly. If there is nothing possible to fix the situation, you should be wise enough to accept that too. So it’s contentment, with conditions. Those conditions imply action and striving towards an optimal goal, and in finding meaning in every moment. We can do this by thinking of every moment as containing the potential for training towards our ideal aim in the domains of character traits, in embodying virtue that we value, and in progressing towards the potential person we would like to be. This training can entail multiple dimensions, depending on what we desire to improve upon, whether it be in developing the mind to be able to handle novel situations, in developing the character to react to the situation appropriately, or potentially in better understanding ourselves and reality through introspection into the content of our own Being in a phenomenological analysis. In any moment you can pay attention to your psyche, what’s passing in and out of consciousness, and create the preconditions for an intentioned consciousness directed towards what you value, or wholesome states of Being. In addition to the positive potentiality, we can also utilize the ability of conscious intentionality to direct our mode of being through causal instantiation of habits and action patterns that work to modify unwholesome or negative states of Being, or diminish the effect they have upon us (based on a solid understanding of the psyche and its contents). I understanding the causal relationships between stimuli, in the form of prior causes and their effects to the current state of consciousness, we can utilize the ability to modify our experience, in one way we can do this to remain content regardless of the content of experience, to merely accept what the moment presents and not be either averse or attached to the content.

Social interactions can be viewed in a similar manner, in the potentiality they contain to improve our habitual formation in solidifying virtuous speech, actions, and intentions in reciprocity as well as directed interaction. On a surface level, this can be done by speaking the truth, manifesting action out of compassionate intention, in managing the psyche by not acting upon egotistic or persona emergence in the psyche. In recognizing the mode of being which is present in the moment, through signals given off from action, thought, and in general, experience, we can take note of the potential manifestations which would stem forth from such a being, and resist or encourage actions depending on how the mode of being is situation in relation to our values. These are some trainings to better yourself you can undergo in any moment of your life, it can make any moment meaningful, and can teach you how to remain peaceful, and content in this very present moment, while not remaining stagnant, and instead being useful, and productive to society in cultivating a good person to reciprocate with, as well as bettering yourself in your own experience of life

Moments of moral shame and dread, or in analyzing criticism of our own shortcomings, do not necessarily need to be impediments to this contentment, but they will inevitably be. We shouldn’t stop looking or listening to criticisms of our faults, and we shouldn’t be content in relation to those errors, we should seek to make amends for them, and to recognize the error in our ways. That being said, while we can hold ourselves responsible for our mistakes through acknowledging them and seeking to rectify them, we can, possibly, remain content within our being that doing so is the right thing to do. We should never seek to stagnate, or remain infallible in our beliefs towards better modes of being. We can always recognize the potential for ourselves to be better, and strive to do so, while simultaneously being okay with the state of things in the present. On a practical note, our desires and unsatisfactoriness is necessarily a condition of our experience, and drives every present moment, here we are seeking to instantiate a contentedness within our psychological relation to experience. The biological desire to achieve this contentedness, may itself produce suffering, and the desire inherent in us and our experience cannot be eradicated, but the psychological story and motivation we can give to ourselves to be able to deal with this fact of existence, can here be optimized to increase individual wellbeing. This is the possibility of contentedness which we are here describing. It is the psychological reaction to the stimulus of the world, it is putting ourselves in relation to the facts of existence, and being okay with the circumstances we find ourselves in, whether we’re rebelling against them or not. It can be developed as an underlying aspect of the mode of being which produces the experience that we experience, and this is something which must be trained, and consciously directed to begin its manifestation. We can understand the all-pervading dream of conscious contentment as being lofty, unrealistic goal, and seems like an impossible Utopian state of mind, which, in an ultimate sense, it is, but that doesn’t mean that we can’t get better at managing the different situations and experiences that shake us from it, and in so seeking, and in so training ourselves, we can move closer, to a degree, to that ultimate contentedness that we form as an impossible ideal, but recognize as being more conducive to a better experience through its production of better reactions to novel situations. In those times with which we experience unwholesome states of being, whether it be due to misfortune, injustices done against us, or acts we regret, we can seek to accept reality for what it is, seek to psychologically place ourselves in a position that is optimal to the overcoming of such difficulties, allowing a calm and rational starting place that is better suited to the reciprocity necessary in confronting difficulty.