Budgeting for discontent

The Chancellor can't please everyone, but is contentment possible?

Paul Valler

Paul Valler is an executive coach and mentor. He is a former chair of the London Institute for Contemporary Christianity.

A woman stands behind a lectern against a blue and red backdrop.

Chancellor Rachel Reeves speaks at a recent event.

HM Treasury.

As the Chancellor Rachel Reeves seeks to raise billions in this Autumn budget, the news media are all over the downsides. Poor pensioners freezing during winter and businesses complaining of the tax burden are political headlines. Tough choices must be made, but we are rarely happy when it comes to money.

Economic discontent is ironically a cultural norm in first world countries. In the west we have become used to what psychologists call the hedonic treadmill – adjusting our expectations to any new benefits and finding ourselves wanting even more, to try to maintain the same level of happiness. It’s a mentality that dooms us to discontent. Socrates said, ‘He who is not contented with what he has, would not be contented with what he would like to have.’

Contentment seems to be a forgotten virtue today, and increasingly elusive in a society striving for happiness through wealth. Yet being content in life is a more valuable form of wealth than money. There is something enormously attractive about a tranquil state of mind and heart. Contentment does not mean passive acquiescence; there is a noble side to being passionately discontented about something that is unjust – especially when we are fighting for others. William Wilberforce demonstrated that with his campaign for the repeal of laws allowing slavery.

Our personal challenge is to be content in ourselves, whatever the circumstances. Oscar Wilde said, ‘True contentment is not having everything, but being satisfied with everything you have.’ Practising paying attention to what we do have and being thankful for it. That attitude of gratitude is a recognised way to lift our mood and strengthen our resilience. But thankfulness doesn’t solve every problem. Warm words may help warm hearts, but they don’t heat cold homes. Although gratitude is proven to improve our wellbeing, it’s not enough to compensate for all the problems of life. Because here’s the deal; life is tough and then you die, and there are many worse things than economic woes.

Pain, grief and loss are all too common, and they can test our resilience beyond what feels like our ability to endure. Chronic physical or mental illness for example; or being permanently disabled. Or the life-sapping effort to parent children with special needs; or caring for a parent/partner with dementia - especially when it goes on and on. Sometimes horrible events happen like violent abuse, or the deep grief of relationship breakdown or bereavement. This level of suffering pushes us to the end of ourselves, to the place where something more than psychological self-help is needed. What is the secret of contentment then?

I don’t envy the Chancellor, and I do not trivialise the very real challenges raised by having to make tough economic choices.

This is where the secular and the Christian worldview are radically different. Secular philosophers call people to show their own self-sufficiency and superior reason when enduring suffering. This can feel principled and stoic, but it lacks empathy and hope. Christianity accepts the reality of our own weakness and insufficiency, recognising that we can’t fix everything ourselves. Instead of trusting in humanity, we choose to trust God both for this life and the life to come. And this trust and hope is linked to a deeper form of contentment, which transcends pure rationality.

Of course, sceptics say this is just psychological comfort from an imaginary friend, and it doesn’t make sense, because surely any good God would not allow us to suffer in the first place. But any realist must acknowledge that a lot of human suffering comes from the damaging exercise of our own free will. Wars and slavery are examples. If God were to override our free will, we would be robbed of the authentic capacity to love, which makes us fully human. The coexistence of free will, suffering and God is a complex issue.

The experience of millions of Christ followers is that trusting God is much more than imaginary comfort. God is real and prayer changes things; the most ordinary, natural and chance experiences can be affected by it. And prayer changes us. In our vulnerability, if we choose to trust God something changes, we begin to relax, things become a bit easier to bear. In fact, the apostle Paul claimed that Christ’s power was perfected in his own weakness.

Contentment is a strange peace that comes from trusting God in the middle of difficult circumstances. One of the great old hymns was written by a man who lost his four daughters in an accident at sea, and also lost all his money in a fire. The refrain says, ‘It is well, it is well with my soul.’ This isn’t denial or delusion, it is the inner sense of quietness that God can give. Only an eternal perspective allows for that kind of contentment.

I don’t envy the Chancellor, and I do not trivialise the very real challenges raised by having to make tough economic choices. Britain is clearly in a place where some stringent fiscal discipline is needed, and that will inevitably cause some hardship and difficulties. But in the face of all the discontent that is so freely shared in the news, there is another way to respond. Instead of complaining about our flawed Government or moaning about our circumstances, we can change our perspective to put our trust in the ultimate Authority. And in doing so can find a peace that the world cannot give. Contentment is a treasure beyond the wealth of nations.

Article

Attention

Culture

Digital

Easter

5 March 2025

4 min read

Let your mind wander if you want to make the most of Lent

How to escape the cold and bitter tunnels of digital distraction.

Simon Burton-Jones

Simon is Bishop of Tonbridge in the Diocese of Rochester. He writes regularly round social, cultural and political issues.

A montage image places a woman, with eyes shut and hands on hip, at the centre of blurred circle of ground and tree branches.

Jr Korpa on Unsplash.

According to Blaise Pascal, the seventeenth century French polymath: all of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.

And now, four hundred years later, we have proof of how hard we find this.

Researchers carried out an experiment, putting several people in a room on their own with nothing else to do but sit there for fifteen minutes. A majority admitted feeling uncomfortable with little but their thoughts to console them. The experiment was repeated, only this time an instrument was placed in the room that could administer an unpleasant electric shock. In the fifteen-minute period, one in four women self-administered the shock to relieve the boredom. Two in three men did.

There is a chance we draw the wrong conclusions from social experiments because it is hard to get into the minds of others, but we can make a good guess here. Our lives are over-stimulated. To be alone in a room with our thoughts for any length of time is unusual to the point of weird. We don’t need to live like this. Our smartphones are the ‘rod and staff which comfort us’. Any spare moment can be spent using TikTok, Instagram or Spotify.

As people age, they tend to think the world is losing its attention span without realising that focus declines as we grow older. But something seems to have changed in the last two decades. A whole new digital architecture has been designed that wasn’t there. It creates the buzz of the city but has gone up around us like skyscrapers, creating cold shadows and bitter wind tunnels of anger and distraction that block out the warmth.

This new online city is intentionally designed to keep our attention; to prevent us from doing anything offline. And it is working. Between 2010 and 2020, globally, we consumed twenty times more information. This is a colossal increase for our brains to cope with in the blink of an evolutionary eye. Our minds have become less like the cool, white minimalist interior design people aspire to in life and more like the junk garage where broken and pointless stuff is tipped.

According to Johann Hari in Stolen Focus, we tend to blame ourselves for this state of affairs. After all, if we tell others our smartphone is distracting us, the answer we get back is to turn it off. While we can take steps like this, Hari says it lets tech companies off the hook. As with shopaholics, there is individual responsibility, but there is also the edifice of consumer capitalism designed to make us buy more stuff or absorb more information.

Mind wandering is, paradoxically, a form of attention. It is the space where we solve the puzzles of our lives, joining dots we had missed, colouring in a picture to bring it alive.

When we consider what it means to follow Jesus today, we often do not appreciate what tech is doing to us. The gains are obvious – having the world at our fingertips, being able to talk to family and friends in an instant – but the losses remain obscure. How does digital distraction affect reading of the Bible and a commitment to prayer? There is little research on this, but we may be giving God less devoted attention than before. In flitting from one source to another, like a fly on a hot summer’s day, we do not stay long enough in one place to discover if God is waiting for us there.

Prompts from God frequently emerge outside the thinking of the Church. A cohort of Silicon Valley tech wizards has come up with the idea of the digital Sabbath, where people spend one day a week unplugged. Though describing themselves as not especially religious, their manifesto practically drowns in religious tradition. They advise people to:

Avoid technology
Connect with loved ones
Nurture your health
Get outside
Avoid commerce
Light candles
Drink wine
Eat bread
Find silence
Give back

It is sabbath re-imagined for the digital era.

Johann Hari also lists some practical actions that can be taken, like staying on task and limiting exposure to social media in particular as it is shown to be bad for mental health in large doses. We should also allow our minds to wander. This does not contradict the argument about not losing focus. Mind wandering is, paradoxically, a form of attention. It is the space where we solve the puzzles of our lives, joining dots we had missed, colouring in a picture to bring it alive.

When the prophet Elijah meets with God at Mount Horeb, there is first a strong wind, then a powerful earthquake and lastly a raging fire. But God does not reveal himself in these gripping phenomena. He is to be found in the sheer silence which follows; in the whisper of a voice.

The sheer silence today is broken by the familiar buzz of a news feed or social media update – or the shock of an electric current. The moment we move out of earshot of the faint audio of the divine.

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