In the days of yore, land was the only resource available to humans to have a say in the material aspects of life. As for the land-less, neither ambition nor resentment was to any avail to get in the universality of inequality. What is worse, as envy and caprice only made it worse, the wise among the have-nots learned to cultivate contentment in their minds to mend their resource-less lives, and even the less resourceful ones, relatively speaking that is.
Thus emerged the old adage — contentment is the finest thing in the world — to lend peace of mind to the lacking millions by way of a stoical philosophy. Nonetheless, one’s reconciliation with the deprivations that contentment entails serves so much and no more, for it fails to enable them to feel fulfilled. This is the essence of equitable living.
However, the advancement of the world that enlarged the frontiers of livelihood began to afford material opportunities to the landless lot and that came to alter the grammar of living, written with the alphabets of ambition. Over time, as success became the keyword of life and contentment the anathema to ambition, humans truly set themselves on the rat race on the material course to their mental detriment. Be that as it may, humans need not feel damned, so it seems, for they could redeem themselves through the concept of the contribution they themselves had evolved, that is by shifting the gear from the sense of success.
It may be appreciated that each one in every station of life is integral to its inherent mechanism with assorted functions, all vital to its material functioning. Just like the price of the machinery components vary, the mechanism of life entails variable rewards to the individual contributors akin to the landed and the landless inequity.
Well, but it’s not back to square one if only one’s sense of contribution becomes the source of their fulfilment. Say, a server in a hotel, if only their service at the tables is looked at as a contribution to society at large, notwithstanding his modest earnings, still the quality of their fulfilment could be immeasurable.
Thus, expanding on Peter Drucker’s quote, ‘A first-rate truck driver is better than a tenth-rate executive’, we can say that the former could feel fulfilled on account of their sense of contribution, which would be beyond the grasp of the latter despite their material overreach.
This is how a sense of contribution is the source of fulfilment in life that mere contentment cannot bring about.