The Fortress of Pseudo Contentment

Art of Self-Satisfaction: "Taoist Female Practices" and "Culture of Sublimation"  

There are people who are satisfied with their lives and have no regrets about anything. Some of these live in an enviable almost impermeable fortress of self-satisfaction and well-being. They've achieved their goals of raising a family and achieving a reasonable level of success in their chosen profession and they’re ready to pass the baton on the next generation.  At the other end of the spectrum are those enormously unhappy types who have never achieved the things they wanted. This doesn’t mean they haven't had success at anything. It may just indicate that the areas in which they experienced success did not conform with their expectations. They may even have raised that family and won the respect of their colleagues, but this is not what they wanted. John Updike for instance had wanted to draw cartoons, something for which The New Yorker is famous. It turned out that he became a legendary short story writer for that magazine. The late Justice John Paul Stevens, as was noted in Shakespeare scholar James Shapiro's recent NewYorker piece, appears to have opined on the authorship of Shakespeare’s plays. He joined the camp of those who believe that it was the Earl of Oxford who may have been the true Shakespeare. Judges have the wherewithal to be literary critics to the extent that they weigh evidence. Was he a frustrated scholar, who would rather have handed down interpretations of literature than law? Then of course there's another category of individual who suffers from a perceptual problem in which they actually feel they have never really had a chance to be, in any true sense? They may have put off or avoided the opportunities that came to them, existing in a limbo where they unhappily got by while others went about living their lives. Love and work, career and relationships seemed to have eluded them and whose fault was it really? If they are embittered and blame the world, they are the ones who will ultimately have to answer for their own frailties.