"Settling is giving up"

There's a word waiting for anyone who stops chasing the next thing, and the word is settling. You know people who settled. They're in the job they had at twenty-eight and the house they bought at thirty, and something in the way you think about them is a little sorry for them, and the thought of becoming them is one of the things that keeps the search open at nine. If you stop wanting more, you've given up.

I want to take the word apart, because it's doing a job. Settling means accepting a life you didn't choose because you couldn't get the one you wanted. That's a real thing and it's sad. But it isn't the only alternative to chasing. There's a third position, which is choosing the life in hand, and it looks the same from the outside and is nothing like it from the inside. The person who settled is still comparing, every day, the life they've got with the one they didn't get, and losing. The person who chose is comparing nothing. They've looked at the life in hand, decided it's the life, and put their effort into it rather than into the search for its replacement.

The difference shows on a Thursday afternoon. The settler is on the sofa with the listings open and a hum. The chooser is doing something to the garden they've got.

Now the word content, because I've been using it and I should say what I mean. I don't mean happy. Happy is a high, and it's the feeling of the season, and it can't be held. Content is lower and steadier. It's the state of not needing the situation to be different in order to get on with the afternoon. It's compatible with wanting things, with ambition, with plans. What it isn't compatible with is the if-only, the belief that the afternoon can't be got on with until something arrives. That's my definition, not a researcher's, and I think it matters because the next thing promises happy and what most people actually want, when they look closely, is content. The season gave you happy for two months and then took it away. Content is what the season never delivered, because it isn't the sort of thing a delivery can bring.

So "settling is giving up" has it half right. Settling is giving up. Choosing isn't, and choosing is available to you now, with the job and the house and the person you've got, on the condition that you stop treating them as the waiting room for the real ones. That's harder than moving, in one way, because moving is a thing you do once and choosing is a thing you do on Thursdays. It's also the only one of the two that the research suggests can change the level.