Perspective: Pursuit of Happiness vs. Contentment

We read a personal writing that touched our hearts last night and just thought we would share it with you. We are in a place in life where our friends bought their first apartments and tried to build families (ie. get pregnant). On the first issue, we have been considering to buy our own place too for awhile. (Second issue, not today’s topic). Wouldn’t it be nice to call a place our home and bought it with our hard earned money? However, two months ago, we have come into conclusion that we will hold off. Call us crazy but we still want to rent and live in our 1,000 sq feet private basement suite for the next little while. We figured that our rent is really affordable and if we got into mortgage, we’ll be paying 3x higher monthly (including maintenance and property tax). So, it makes sense that we write down our pros and cons list:

Pros:
-1,000 sq feet for low price, no problem! We’ll save the difference for our first house downpayment! And leftover can go to our travel budget.
-There are only 2 of us in the place for now. Space-wise is more than enough.
-The living room is big enough to hold 15-18 of our friends and we love entertaining!

Cons:
-Mortgage (plus maintenance and tax) will be 3x higher than our current living expense monthly. Annual travel budget will be gone unless we get sweet contracts or increase in salary!
-Square feet wise, we’ll get a smaller place unless we are willing to spend more (which we don’t, let’s stick to the budget!)
-Entertaining is still possible but maybe less than 10 friends at a time.

And then, we found this article about finding contentment. And we love it! How perfect this confirmation is to our newly-made decision. We just have to quote on Donald’s: There’s a lot that goes into happiness and I’m not saying downsizing is the key. But I think it’s a big part of it. For me, downsizing was about no longer buying the stuff I thought would make me content. I realize now it really won’t. In fact, getting rid of the clutter and square feet made the “pursuit of happiness” that much easier. There was less false hope around.

This is so true and yet so underestimated in this day and age where every single commercial is competing to get our attention and money. And Donald’s checklist? Just a little something we are working on ourselves right now, here is the quote from his: For me, the checklist for being content in life involved:
• Connecting with people I love each day
• Having a healthy routine
• Getting sleep and taking a sabbath
• Working on a meaningful project
• Giving generously to the people around me
• Being wise with my finances
• Having some sort of artistic creative expression in my life
• Having a long-term vision for my life

We just think this is a great topic to share because not a lot of people are writing about it. We have been sharing this perspective to close friends around us but haven’t found our way yet to write it down like this. While we are sharing this in the perspective of our buy vs. rent, the principle can still be applied to many other areas in our lives. We really hope that you are encouraged reading this and let’s all stop the race of possessing more picture frames and cute home decorations. No? That’s just us? 🙂 What are you trying to get rid off or stop buying this year? Would love to hear from you on the comment box below!

To end this post, here is the pond three blocks away from our place. We just have to share this image to show the beauty of this season in our lives right now:

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Jenn and Kevin

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