self-content

To be an individual, to be self-content — those are nice qualities for a life.

In a section of the document titled “Signs of Holiness in Today’s World,” the pope explicitly laments a modern culture that includes “the self-content bred by consumerism; individualism; and all those forms of ersatz spirituality — having nothing to do with God — that dominate the current religious marketplace.”

Challenges “To be absolutely certain that one isn’t feeling smug or self-content. One’s got to go on concentrating on everything as if it was a new piece.”

Cricket is linked with the Golden Age of English power and self-content, the idyll that supposedly existed before the First World War.

There are hermit souls that live withdrawn In the peace of their self-content; There are souls, like stars, that dwell apart, In a fellow-less firmament; There are pioneer souls that blaze their paths Where highways never ran:— But let me live by the side of the road And be a friend to man.