My mom and I had a conversation a few days ago about contentment and how it affects her life.  She said to me, “being discontent has been quite expensive for me”. She meant that because she hasn’t had a great deal of confidence in her life, she has continually tried to find her identity in material things. She has never really found who she wants to portray herself as to the world everyday and just felt comfortable. When she sees friends, she sees all the things that they are that she is not and has a hard time with that instead of seeing herself for all the fabulous yet different things that she has to offer.

During that conversation she also said to me, “I want to learn how to be happy with what I am not”. Here she is, someone who has sought contentment and happiness in material things, and she’s not very happy. She’s not entirely unhappy but she is self aware enough to realize that there are things she wishes weren’t so in her life and she wants to make peace with who she is and stop feeling insecure and the need to be something she is not.  She and my father have done well for themselves financially and so she has been able to literally afford the insecurity and the expense of her discontent, but that doesn’t make it any better.  She has paid another price entirely that she can’t truly afford because being discontent means wasting precious time and energy in the short amount of time we’re given.

We talked in that conversation about my life when I was in my late teens and early twenties, up until just a couple of years ago, when I was in the same trap. I can look back with certainty and say that the unrest in my life then and the discontent I felt was because I was trying to keep up with and be accepted by people. I wanted people to like me and the way I tried to do that was to impress them with the way I looked and the things I had. I was defining myself in material goods. It was expensive and I was miserable.

As we spoke about that time of unhappiness in my life, she said that she can see over the past year or so that I have grown into what she wishes she had. She wants to be able to say “good enough” and live with it and stop striving for nicer clothes, a newer and different house, and all the things that she fell into the trap of during her life to try to impress others. Letting other people influence who we are, what we spend money on and how we define ourselves can lead to an endless path of spending if we’re not careful or aware enough to see it.

My mom also said to me in that conversation, “You aren’t just frugal, Em. You’re content. Frugal is just a result of your contentment. It would be really hard to be frugal and live simply the way you do if you weren’t confident and content enough to live it with a smile on your face.”  I think that may pretty much sum up how frugality has become such a big part of my life in the past year or so. It fell into place once I found myself content and happy with what is. I stopped seeking happiness in what others think of me. I stopped letting others influence my tastes and choices.  I started to see in others how they were living in that trap and instead of following them through the insecurity that leads to living a life that isn’t authentically mine, I chose to go a different way.  I chose to not let what other people think of a small and simple life influence me and instead embraced it for all the beauty it presented to my life. I realized that material things make life comfortable but instead of striving for things that are beyond my reach, I know now to be appreciative of what I have. I can constantly improve, change, and even spend money.  But, I have learned that doing so for anyone but myself is a sure way to live an expensive yet unhappy and unfulfilled life.