Being at peace with ourselves

Of course we need to be honest with ourselves if we're ever going to be at peace with ourselves. On the other hand, we need to be absolutely sure that peace is what we want. The metaphor from international relations is rather misleading, after all: what are the benefits of peace?--trade and prosperity, say, and the removal of the threat of being explosively disaggregated. Setting this last (of course, significant) merit aside, on the grounds that it requires a very great quantity of metaphorical internal strife actually to kill us--what of the others? In what ways would a prosperity of the self differ from a mere bourgeois smugness of ego? And how are we to benefit from trading with ourselves?