At Least Bugs Are Not Snakes: Contending For Contentment

My house in Tanzania could have been an insectarium. Maybe I should have charged admission to tourists. 

One year, the kitchen was infested with cockroaches. The little ones would run out of the toaster and I would smash them with my fist. 

Another year, it was ticks. Like, literally, ticks were climbing the walls of my kitchen. The engorged ones would burst open and then the live ones would leave tiny bloody footprints on the floor.

Twice, guests in our home were stung by centipedes in their beds in the middle of the night. 

Then there was the Year of the Millipedes, which don’t sting but, at six inches long, are unpleasant to find curled up on your wooden spoon or inside your shoe. Johnny spent months sharing Josiah’s bed due to millipede-phobia. Josiah once smashed one with a hammer, triumphantly announcing that he had killed his prey. I usually picked them up with my fingers and flushed them alive down the toilet.  

Each time we victoriously exterminated one species, another moved in. 

But we didn’t have it so bad. My friend Alyssa lived in a house infested with snakes, and after the seventeenth one, they finally moved. Their new house’s attic was infested with bats, and the guano sprinkled like glitter over her children’s beds. So millipedes? No biggie. 

My house had a miniature kitchen sink that couldn’t fit my biggest pot. It had weird pink tiles in the living room and all sorts of half-steps throughout the rooms that guests tripped over. It had no cross-breeze, and so was hot and stuffy. The windows were always open, leaving a fine layer of dust on everything. 

My friend Lucy and her family of six lived in a home where she bought 25 gallons of water each day from a neighbor half a block away. It cost her about 15 percent of her monthly salary, and she carried that water in buckets back to her house.

My house had tiled floors and polished wood ceilings. I had indoor plumbing and electricity that worked most times and a generator when it didn’t. I had an air conditioner in my bedroom to push out the tropical heat while we slept. Bugs and all, compared to Lucy, I lived in luxury.

Yet Lucy considered herself blessed because she only had to walk half a block to get water, instead of the miles that many women in Tanzania have to walk. She and her husband owned their cinderblock home. Her roof boasted a solar panel so they could run fans at night. By Tanzanian standards, they were almost middle class. “We are poor,” she told me once, with a twinkle in her eye (Lucy’s eyes were always twinkling), “But we are not very, very poor.”

So how could I whine about my bugs? Despite them, I was still freakishly wealthy. I was surrounded by people who had it way worse than we did. So I went along smashing and flushing bugs, and I was content. 

When we moved into our home in California, it felt like I was living in a vacation rental. I had vaulted ceilings and large windows with a cascade of light. I had a walk-in closet. I had a giant sink and a dishwasher. Every night when I turned off the lights, I would stand on the stairwell and gaze at it all, disbelieving that I lived there. I had zero bugs. 

Six months later, I was walking around my neighborhood and came to the housing development next to ours. I noticed differences: these houses were a bit larger. Nicer trimmings. More spacious driveways. That would be nice, I thought. Maybe we should have held out for a house in this neighborhood instead.

Discontentment descended in a flash.

I stopped for a moment, dazed. How could that thought even go through my mind? Did I not remember my House of Bugs? Did I not remember Lucy? How was it possible that I could live content for so many years in my house in Tanzania and yet find myself discontent so quickly (yet with so much more) in America? 

Why should I be surprised? America is built on discontentment. We could argue that the American Dream is based on the principle of having “enough”– but how much is enough? In 1950, the average home was 1000 square feet. Now, it’s 2500. “Enough” keeps getting bigger. And for me to have enough, I need to convince you that you don’t have enough. You need to buy what I am selling so that I can have more.

It’s effective, isn’t it? I read that Americans are exposed to at least 5000 advertisements every day. This blows my mind, but then I think about billboards, store magazines, internet ads that pop up uninvited. 

We know they are lying to us, don’t we? We know their products won’t actually make us happier, skinnier, more beautiful. We know they just want our money. We know that listening to their lies awakens an insatiable beast who is never satisfied. It will never be enough. And yet still, we listen. I listen.

Is it possible to find contentment in America when the air we breathe demands our discontentment? We can’t stop breathing air. 

I’ve started yelling back at the voices trying to steal my contentment. When the basketball game is on and I hear commercials vying to pilfer the souls of my children, they hear me holler from the kitchen, “That’s a lie!” I’m sure they roll their eyes. But I keep saying it. I need to hear myself say it. 

My kids envy those who wear designer shoes and bring Starbucks to school each morning, whose parents take them to shop at places other than Goodwill or Ross. My child asks, “Are we poor, Mom?”

They’ve learned the hard way this is the wrong question to ask Mom. “Don’t you dare think we are poor! Don’t you ever, ever think that. You know what poor looks like. And that’s not us.” They are surprised by the intensity in my voice. They don’t realize I’m talking to myself, too.

Is comparison an appropriate strategy against discontentment? Perhaps not the only strategy. But it’s helpful. If comparing up makes me discontent, then comparing down creates gratitude. When I am cocooned in my middle-class American Dream, it’s easy to think that I am lacking. When I zoom my perspective out of America, I remember that I am in the top 4 percent worldwide. I am the aristocracy of the world. If Lucy can be content in walking half a block for water instead of a mile, if I could once be content that my bugs were not snakes, then I certainly can be content living in the wealthiest country in the world.

But I must force myself to remember. It’s conscious. It’s deliberate, intentional. It’s daily, hourly, living with a mindset of gratitude. 

When the voices around me are an onslaught – an all-out tsunami – girding myself for war against them is the only option. Because I already have more than enough. I must not allow myself to forget. 

My beautiful spring garden

Related:
Swimming in the Stuff of America
This American High
On Getting the American Dream