Contentment, I believe, comes from having stability in our lives.  But above and beyond that, we each have need for love and caring - a closeness that once was and now is harder to find. 

What has happened to what once was?  I would attribute it to the fast-paced, almost regimented lives most of us live now.  Surely our children don’t seem to be living the carefree lives many of us had in our youth.  The feeling of family close in - those we could count on and love - have been scattered to the four winds.  Friends?  Too busy too often to bolster our sagging spirits. 

The wonders of the computer age have left us standing with our cell phones, often on inconsequential conversations.  Hours that used to be spent enjoying each other’s company are now spent sitting alone at our computers staring at a screen.  As wondrous as they are, they are no trade-off for intimate conversations.  We stare at screens of all sorts instead of laughing together.  Are our hearts full these days?  Doubtful, except on occasion.  We hold pieces of plastic more hours than we hold our loved ones.

Women run high on emotions — and for most of us, we need our fill of love and enjoyment to be complete.  Remember "open arms stretched wide"?  How often do we see that, feel that?  Not near enough.  How often do we hear the words we long to hear?  How can we hear those precious things when life is too often a rat race, and each of us are alone with our tiny machines pressing buttons?  How often - if we are honest - do we see joy, real joy - in someone’s face, in their words?  How many marriages even hold together?   

Those of us who remember what we now call "the simpler life" play the game of "remember when".  . and we smile at those joys that were. 

For good reason.

I was a teenager in the 60’s when everything was furiously changing for women.   Women were burning their bras, experiencing sexual freedom, buying their own cars, going to college and grad school and bringing in half of the family’s income….children were placed in daycare, divorces increased, and  we were experiencing assassinations in our country, the Viet Nam War, a president who resigned, Kent State….it’s actually painful to go on with the list of "changes" that took place during  the 60’s and 70’s.  

I am far happier today than I was 40 years ago….no question about it.  My happiest years were the years raising my three children molding them into happy, well balanced individuals and helping them to chart their lives as they grew to be teenagers.   I admire all three of my children for many different reasons.   They know how much fun they were to raise because I often remind them.  The older they get the more inclined they are to revisit those moments with me.    Now the grandchildren fill up my big heart with their march towards adulthood and I feel as though I’m starting all over again being a part of their lives.

I would never opt to go back 40 years.   I love where I am now! 

The questions asked and the canned responses allowed.

If I were to survey men at 6:30pm every Monday for a month, at a self-service gasoliine station with these questions, what do you think their responses would be?

#1. You are returning to/from work. Along the road, pulled over to the side, you see an elderly man looking under the hood of his car. Choose one of the following:

a. You would stop to stop to see if you might be able to help they elderly gentleman. You do, after all, have a bit of knowledge about changing tires.

b. You would stop to see if you might be of some sort of assistance to the elderly man. You don’t know a thing about cars but you do know how to use a cell phone.

c. You would stop to sympathize with the old man until a cop arrived to summon help.

d. You would look at the old geezer as you drove by thinking that it is old fools like that which make rush hour traffic jams as bad as they are.

e. You would honk to get the old fool’s attention and then give him the finger and as you drove past.

#2. Your wife calls you out of the most important meeting of your entire career to ask you to hurry home because her labor pains are 4 minutes apart, her water has broken, and she needs you to drive her to the hospital. In the background you are able to hear the television. You would do which of the following:

a) Reassure your wife that you love her and you will be there right away. Then you would return to the meeting and explain that a family emergency requires your immediate presence, offer an apology and leave the meeting.

b) You would reassure your wife that you love her and you will be right there but this is a very important meeting afterall so what can it hurt to go in and try to hurry things up? After all, you have heard before that babies don’t just pop out!

c) You tell your wife that you are sure she is just having false labor pains again because the baby is still not due for 3 more days. You advise her to put her feet up and drink a cup of tea but to call back in an hour if the pains persist. You return to the meeting and try to hurry through your presentation.

d) You explain to your wife that it is impossible for you to leave the meeting at this time and she will just have to call one of her friends or family to take her to the hospital but you reassure her that you will be there as soon as the meeting is over.

e) You didn’t even know she was preggers! You thought she was just letting herself go to pot.

I find this question resulting from "a recent report" ambiguous for several reasons: Within what age group was this conducted? Depending at what age you were forty years ago would have some bearing on how that era affected you. How was happiness defined? If I’m asking young women today who are tackling jobs, and families and have multiple responsibilities if they are less happy than they were forty years ago what would they say? Especially if their age is in the thirty range. So if we are talking about older women, then perhaps this so called unhappiness is not from having too much on their plates, but from having too little. Joan talked of our lack of real connections, the fast paced lives we live now. I would argue that as older women we should finally be able, as caren pointed out, to change things (if we can which for some may be difficult or impossible). I made a decision after I retired to winnow down to the bare essentials. It took some time, but my life now is exactly how I wanted it to be. Forty years ago? My god, I was like a dog in heat, a heady time, indeed, and I remember it with fondness, but I have grown with the times, I think, and now have found that contentment Joan mentioned. BUT contentment does not mean complacentcy  or resting on any laurels. What it does mean for me is the space I now give myself to continually learn and expand. 

P.S. I still love, "Hi dude, what’s up?" Some things never change, retaining some of our former quirks.  

This poll reminds me of my answer to yesterday’s question about multi-tasking. Years ago when the world was more simple and far less complicated, we thought we wanted things faster, sleeker, cooler and more expedient. But with those changes came a faster world where we had to do more to keep up with what was taking place around us.

So too is it for women. We wanted life to change and now that it has and we are required to juggle a million balls in the air at one time, we end up feeling overwhelmed. So the question of happiness is one most of us (not all) don’t even have time to contemplate. We’re too busy putting out the multitude of fires we have to deal with each day. Far to busy to think about being happy.

How many of us lose sleep each night because we’re already worrying about what must be done tomorrow? How ironic it is that now that we finally have equality on most levels, can do what we want, when we want, that we long for a simpler less frantic pace of life.