‘One more thing’ can never bring the peace we can have right now

By David McElroy · May 11, 2023

What would it take to make you happy? To feel content? To feel satisfied with life?

We use different words to talk about this, but almost everybody instinctively knows what I’m talking about. Most of us have some story we tell ourselves about what it would take for us to feel at peace with our lives.

Some people think more money would make them happy. Others care little about money but crave the love and acceptance they’ve always needed. Others want power or social status. They want others to see them some particular way. They think if they had a particular house or car or boat — or something — they would be able to be content with the world and at peace with their lives.

I’m no different. I’ve had money in the past, but found it brought little peace. At this point in my life, I’d love to have more money, but I know it wouldn’t change my satisfaction with life. It wouldn’t give me the peace I crave.

My holy grail right now is connection — to be loved, accepted, valued and understood. Some deep part of me believes I would be happy — would have peace, find contentment, whatever you want to call it — if I simply had a family and some deep community connection. I have a beautiful and loving picture of what that life could look like. And I feel as though it would change everything.

But I have the nagging intuition that I’m wrong. In my gut, I have the terrible feeling that if I can’t be happy or content or at peace right now — when I’m alone and lack many of the things I want — I wouldn’t find those things if all my dreams suddenly came true.

This certainly isn’t an original idea. I’ve seen it — and basically ignored it — in various philosophies and teachings all my life. I first encountered it in church years ago. I heard preachers talk about being satisfied with God instead of wanting worldly things.

In my own Christian faith, the notion is probably best known in the words of the apostle Paul. In his letter to the Philippians, here’s what he wrote:

“…I have learned to be content whatever the circumstances. I know what it is to be in need, and I know what it is to have plenty. I have learned the secret of being content in any and every situation, whether well fed or hungry, whether living in plenty or in want. I can do all this through him who gives me strength.”

I hadn’t realized this until recently, but I’ve unconsciously thought of the idea as nonsense. I don’t think the preachers who taught it to me really believed what they said, either. Despite their words, I saw most of these men — when I’ve seen their real passions and wants — act as though they could be happy through the same kind of success the rest of us have pursued. Just a religious version.

Without thinking much about it, most of us have lived — at least for a good bit of life — in the words of Gerry Rafferty’s 1978 song, “Baker Street“:

Another year and then you’d be happy
Just one more year and then you’d be happy
But you’re crying, you’re crying now

We need another year. We need another big win. We need another notch on a social ladder. Or something. But almost all of us have lived this way. Unconsciously, it’s the way I’ve lived. If I just had some success, people would love me. If I just had the right wife, I would feel the acceptance I’ve craved. If I had the connection to others in my community, that would change everything.

I’m not saying that none of these things can matter. Being poor makes life difficult. Being alone makes life lonely. Being a failure (or perceiving yourself as a failure) can make you feel a sense of misery.

But here’s what has always confused me. I have known people who were joyful and at peace while they lived lives that seemed horrible by my standards. I have known people who have chosen to put themselves into deprivation of one sort or another but who seemed to experience peace and contentment.

Were they just fooling themselves? Was it just their personalities that made them able to ignore the needs and desires and angst that I feel about my own life? I think I’ve always had the unconscious belief that they were somehow different from me.

I still want the things that I know I want. I’d like to be more successful again. I want love and a family and connection. I’d like the money to buy nicer things and travel to places I’d like to go. I’d like for people to see me as providing something worthwhile to them. I’d like them to admire me.

But my gut tells me that if I can’t learn to feel peace and contentment in my life today — regardless of the circumstances — I won’t find it if I have all those things which I think would make me happy.

I recently read that when people acquire the big things in life that they wanted so badly — a house or car or boat or whatever — it takes only eight weeks, on average, for the joy to fade away. People tend to feel excited about the thing that had been wanting, but they soon found it was just another part of their lives.

Those things simply didn’t bring the deeper feelings of satisfaction that we all unconsciously crave from the things we want.

I can’t pretend to know exactly how to find this joy and peace and contentment. It’s easy to piously say it’s all about finding God and obeying him. There’s truth in that — from my point of view — but most of the people I know who would quote Paul’s lines about being content in all things aren’t even close to finding the contentment the words speak of.

It’s become a thing that we Christians quote in sermons and we tell others how they ought to be like this — but we go right on living as though we expect the things we can acquire to make us happy.

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” we seem to think. “That’s great, but in my case, I also need this one other thing. Anybody would understand that.”

I don’t have it all figured out. I just know that I’m finally fully conscious of the fact that I have to find peace within — the deeper spiritual kind — right here, right now.

If I’m not able to find the peace and contentment that I crave — without the “one more thing” that I always think I need — none of those things will ever matter. But finally admitting that to myself and accepting that it’s true is the most important first step.

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If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

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