I’ve been thinking a lot about where discontempt in life comes from. Why are we sometimes so unhappy about the way things are going in life? How can be overcome this discontempt?

One explanation that went through my head a lot about this topic was the disconnection between one’s thoughts and feelings — between one’s brain and heart.

When confronted with a choice, you always have two voices in your head that fight over who makes the decision for this particular choice. Sometimes one of the two voices has no interest in the choice at hand and the other side wins automatically. Other times, both sides fight and whoever screams the loudest will win the argument and decide, which choice is made.

I think, this is the place where discontempt creeps in. If one side, either the logical or the emotional side, wins this screaming match and no tradeoff is found, the losing side will make you feel remorse for you decision.

So even though you felt like eating this entire bag of gingerbread, you now feel bad for doing it and not having yourself and your desires under control. You should know better than this, right?

Maybe you have the choice to become a famous artist, but you’d have to give up your steady job. You could follow and fulfill your dreams, but at the same time you might fail and end up jobless. If your logical side wins this argument, the choice will be most likely to stick with your current job — the chances of becoming a famous artist are slim to none anyway, right? But this decision could make you feel miserable. Being stuck in a steady, paying job is the logical thing to do, but it isn’t what makes you happy. So your emotional side makes you feel remorse for your decision.

I think you get the gist here. This can be applied to a lot of situations in life, where one feels discontempt. Maybe there is something missing that I’m currently not seeing, but for now this seems like a good explanation of the source of discontempt and unhappiness in one’s life.

Now the question becomes, how can one use this concept to overcome this discontempt. I guess, there needs to be a compromise between the logical and emotional side — one has to find their own balance between what they think they should be doing, and what they feel like they should be doing.

I’ll probably think some more about this topic — maybe there’ll even be a blog post about it…

Ash