Do You Suffer from Perpetual Discontent?
It’s a malady, that’s for sure. Maybe you don’t have it, but you know someone who does. It’s this state of being where a person is always discontented. There is always something. It’s really a pretty unhappy way to live, and I think many times it is just a bad habit. I know my first year of sobriety involved a lot of grousing, whining, and complaining. It created an overall feeling of discontent. Fortunately, a few things happened that woke me up and alerted me to the fact that I had really chosen to see the negative side of everything and that colored my day. It suddenly occurred to me one day, oh my, I haven’t had a drink for almost a whole year! How did that happen? (It happened one day at a time). Then I thought, do I want to feel like this every day for ANOTHER year? Hell, no.
I can’t describe this moment as anything other than an epiphany: I recognized in that moment that I had become addicted to be discontented. I liked complaining! And because I had developed this attitude that everything was blah, I felt like blah. It’s one of the cornerstones of cognitive behavioral therapy that beliefs and attitudes influence how you think – and hence, how you feel. It seems almost too simple to be true, but it is. People who tend toward depression tend to think things like “this always happens to me,” “nothing ever goes right,” “no one understands.” People who do not tend toward depression have more rational reactions, like “this wasn’t so good, but maybe it will be better next time,” “Oh well, live and learn,” and “could be a lot worse.”
Perpetual discontent has its advantages, otherwise we wouldn’t fall into it. First, it gets you a lot of attention (at first, until people get sick of it) because it’s just so sad how pathetic your life is based on what you continually tell people. You poor miserable thing! Let me see if I can help you! It solicits attention, and sometimes attention is what we want. Sometimes we just want the badge of honor of being the sickest person in the room. But this is not fun. It wears you down and wears you out. It’s exhausting to be lamenting life on a regular basis.
It’s hard sometimes to see the addiction to discontent. It feels very real to you when you are in it. But in 99% of cases it is not rational. Life is not that bad for most people. Oh, there are bad things that happen and we don’t always get our way, but most of the time the bad things are just things – they do not define our whole life. I hope if any of you have a case of perpetual discontent that you have your epiphany too. It feels oh so good.
