Yesterday, we looked at the secret society of contentment that Paul wants us to be initiated into. Today, we’ll explore more of the things that keep us from contentment.
Paul says in Philippians 4, “I have learned in whatever situation I am to be content.” That one word is so important: contentment is something we learn. It’s not something that just comes naturally. It didn’t in Paul’s day, and it sure doesn’t now. We live in a future-looking, optimistic culture. We expect great things to come. In fact, we’ve started to believe that we deserve great things. That’s how every advertiser sells his product these days: by convincing us that we deserve it.
This advertising tactic plays right into the feelings of people like me who grew up just as the self-esteem movement was gaining steam. It used to be that kids were taught they could earn things by working hard. They were taught to take pride in the accomplishment of a job well done. But starting in the 70’s and 80’s, everyone from kindergarten teachers to high school P.E. coaches wanted to make every kid feel successful, whether we’d actually accomplished anything or not. And so the last couple generations of kids have grown up believing that success in life is absolutely inevitable.
Need proof? A few years ago, Newsweek reported on a psychologist named Harold Stevens at the University of Michigan, who did a series of tests comparing high school students in America to students in Japan, Taiwan, and China. He found that the American kids tested much higher than the other kids in one area: self-confidence about their math skills. Trouble was, American students were at the bottom of the pile when it came to how they actually performed in math (but their math teachers couldn’t tell them that because it might hurt their feelings.)
For the last 30 years, kids in America have grown up believing that they deserve to be successful just because they’re them! And it’s not until we reach 25 or 30 that it finally dawns on us that it might be possible that we’ll never win an Olympic gold medal. It just might not work out that we’re able to start our own company, take it public, and retire by the time we’re 40. It just might be that we’re not going to be President of the United States.
So we’ve invented a new term: “quarter-life crisis.” It used to be that you had to wait until you were 40 or 50 to have a mid-life crisis so you could buy a Harley or a Porsche and try to find whatever kind of significance in life you could grasp. But now, since we’ve been so programmed to expect great things in life no matter what, we start feeling dissatisfied by the time we’re in our late 20’s when things aren’t panning out the way we planned. From that point on, chronic discontent is something we just learn to live with.
Tomorrow, we’ll look at Paul’s answer for breaking the cycle.