Satisfaction

A core thing in life is happiness and everyone is making a scramble for it. It's a land grab, essentially, with the exception that whereas landgrabs are typically zero-sum games, happiness isn't. It's in fact a very typical case of a game where synergies can be witnessed. You can become happier when making other people also more happy--win-win. So everything's fine and dandy and we can all live happily ever after.

There are views that one way to achieve happiness is to be satisfied and content. The idea, I guess, is related to finding your own inner peace and silencing down your inner voices and discarding want. In an optimal situation you would be without want and just content with everything, at balance.

The general idea is good and again has plenty to do with finding equilibriums. But I can't help but reflect a bit on satisfaction. I'm of course nowhere near any sort of balance (in fact I'm more or less recklessly flying from one maximum to another), but I still get the feeling that whereas you're supposed to calm down your wants and search for satisfaction, I can't help but think that instead of traveling in a train full of screaming children, I would be a lot more content and satisfied with traveling in a quiet and elegant Jaguar XF while listening to Astrud Gilberto sing The Girl From Ipanema. This also extends to many other aspects of life as well. Now the holier people will point out that I'm again wanting things, but oh well. I still think that if just being "satisfied" and "content" is the key to happiness, I want to be satisfied and content in peace and quiet, and in style.