Happiness
The Ownership Mindset: Stop Chasing and Start Claiming Your Happiness
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The Capacity for Happiness and Respectability: The Effort of Will as the Ground of Human Dignity
Human beings, for all their manifest weaknesses, remain a remarkably tough and resourceful species.
While we rightly deplore these shortcomings, the cruelty, the laziness, the cowardice that surface all too often, we must also look to the bright side.
There, amid the struggle, we find compelling reasons for hope and renewed commitment to life and to one another. This essay is an exploration of that hope and that commitment.
The Endowment and Its Limits
Humans are liable to experience a vast array of afflictions: physical pain, emotional trauma, social rejection, economic hardship, existential despair. Yet despite this vulnerability, they are commonly endowed with a profound capacity for happiness and respectability. This is not a trivial observation. It suggests that suffering, while real, does not obliterate the possibility of meaning or decency.
But there is no guarantee. No promise inscribed in nature assures that humans will exercise this capacity at all times, or to its fullest extent, regardless of circumstance. Depression and shame remain ever-present possibilities. Their likelihood increases in direct proportion to the severity of afflictions and the difficulty of living up to the values that underwrite genuine happiness and respectability: courage, efficiency, wisdom, and nobility.
The Central Question
Living up to these values is never easy, even under the most favorable conditions. It requires something that cannot be purchased, inherited, or passively received: an effort of will. To make this effort, or not to make it, is the question that lies at the very center of human existence.
This question grows more difficult as the weight of suffering bears down more heavily. When a person is crushed by poverty, chronic illness, loss, or betrayal, their dignity hangs in the balance. The more burdensome the weight, the more tempting the easy way out: resignation, self-destruction, moral collapse. Yet the fear of losing one's dignity is a powerful deterrent. Indeed, there is no greater loss than that of dignity, save the loss of life itself.
Consider two examples. A single mother working two jobs to support her children, exhausted and underappreciated, nevertheless refuses to steal from her employer despite desperate need. She exercises nobility under pressure. Contrast her with a promising young professional who, after a painful divorce and demotion at work, begins drinking heavily, missing deadlines, and lying to friends. His moral collapse is deplorable, but given the excruciating circumstances, it is also understandable. Extreme suffering serves as an extenuating factor, not a justification, but an explanation.
The Remarkable Resilience
Here is what is truly astonishing. Despite the burden of suffering that oppresses so many, the incidence of moral collapse, manifested in errant ways such as carelessness, vagrancy, crime, often accompanied by alcohol or drug abuse employed to fuddle an accusing conscience, remains relatively small when compared with the incidence of worthy behavior.
Most people, most of the time, manage to get up, show up, and do what is required. They care for sick relatives. They show patience with difficult colleagues. They refrain from cruelty even when provoked. They keep promises, pay debts, tell the truth. This mundane heroism rarely makes headlines, but it constitutes the invisible architecture of civilized life.
Furthermore, moral collapse is seldom permanent. It is remediable in most cases, except when the person concerned suffers from an inveterate or congenital weakness of character, or a mental illness that proves beyond cure. On the whole, dignity can be lost and then regained. The addict who finds recovery, the convict who rebuilds his life, the cynic who rediscovers hope, these are not exceptions. They are ordinary evidence of human plasticity.
A concrete illustration: A man in his forties, after a decade of chronic unemployment and episodic homelessness, enters a rehabilitation program. He struggles, relapses twice, but eventually stabilizes. He takes a modest warehouse job, mends relationships with his estranged daughter, and begins volunteering at a food bank. Has he lost dignity along the way? Unquestionably. Has he regained it? Just as unquestionably. The arc of his life bends not neatly upward, but toward redemption nonetheless.
The Grayness of Dawn
As for those who resist quitting the struggle for worthiness, they rarely do their best. Let us be honest about this. In many instances, even the admirable are tainted with some degree of indulgence in laziness, cowardliness, ineffectiveness, foolishness, selfishness, or meanness. Their spirit has the grayness of dawn, neither the blackness of night nor the full brilliance of noon.
Consider a dedicated schoolteacher who inspires hundreds of students over a thirty-year career. She arrives early, stays late, spends her own money on classroom supplies. Yet she is also prone to gossip about colleagues, favors certain students unfairly, and resists learning new technology out of stubborn pride. Her shadow follows her. Even those who shine like a late-morning sun have a shadow of imperfection at their heels.
Another example: A successful surgeon who has saved countless lives and donated generously to medical charities. He is also cold to his children, dismissive of nurses, and secretly contemptuous of patients he deems responsible for their own illnesses. His nobility coexists with meanness. The two are not mutually exclusive; they are, sadly, frequent companions.
The Untapped Potential
In short, humanity has yet to fulfill its potential. There is already much courage in the world, firefighters running into burning buildings, whistleblowers risking their careers, parents sacrificing for children. There is much efficiency, engineers solving complex problems, farmers feeding nations, administrators keeping systems running. There is much wisdom, elders offering counsel, therapists healing trauma, philosophers clarifying thought. There is much nobility, soldiers falling on grenades, activists enduring beatings for justice, ordinary people forgiving the unforgivable.
And yet. And yet there could be a whole lot more.
Think of the small daily failures that accumulate into a life of quiet mediocrity: the exercise you skip, the lie you tell to avoid discomfort, the moment of cowardice when you fail to defend someone being mocked, the hour of television that could have been spent learning or helping. Multiply these across seven billion people, across seventy years each, and the waste is staggering.
The Key
What is the key to this rise in human flourishing? What unlocks the greater reserves of happiness and respectability that remain dormant in most of us?
The answer, as suggested from the outset, is an effort of will.
Not merely wishing. Not passively hoping. Not waiting for circumstances to improve or for others to lead the way. But a deliberate, sustained, often uncomfortable choice to live up to courage, efficiency, wisdom, and nobility, even when it would be easier not to. Especially when it would be easier not to.
This effort does not guarantee success. It does not promise happiness without sorrow or respectability without failure. What it offers is something more modest yet more meaningful: the genuine possibility of a life that, on balance, tilts toward the light. And that possibility, however imperfectly realized, is reason enough for hope.
The Ultimate Birthright And How You Can Claim Yours
Happiness:The key to happiness is both simple and complex. It is the sum total of more than 2,000 years of philosophy, psychology, speculation, and discussion about the meanings and sources of happiness. From Aristotle in 340 B.C. through to the modern thinkers, speakers, and writers of today, this key to happiness has hardly changed. It is the same for virtually all men and women in every country and all walks of life. The key to happiness is this: Dedicate yourself to the development of your natural talents and abilities by doing what you love to do, and doing it better and better in the service of a cause that is greater than yourself. This is a big statement and a big commitment. Being happy requires that you define your life in your own terms and then throw your whole heart into living your life to the fullest. In a way, happiness requires that you be perfectly selfish in order to develop yourself to a point where you can be unselfish for the rest of your life.
YOUR HAPPINESS MUST COME FIRST In Edmond Rostand’s Play Cyrano de Bergerac, Cyrano is asked why he is so intensely individualistic and unconcerned with the opinions and judgments of others. He replies with these wonderful words: “I am what I am because early in life I decided that I would please at least myself in all things.” Your happiness likewise depends upon your ability to please at least yourself in all things. However, most people are reluctant to use their own happiness as the standard by which to judge the events in their lives. This is primarily because we let others define or affect what brings us happiness. And we often believe it is more important to make other people happy than it is to make ourselves happy. This is nonsense. Human beings are happiness-driven organisms. Everything we do in life is oriented toward maintaining and increasing our level of happiness.
We are psychologically constructed so that it is impossible for us to be any other way without making ourselves mentally and emotionally ill. The fact is that you can’t give away to anyone else what you don’t have for yourself. Just as you can’t give money to the poor if you don’t have any, you can’t make someone else happy if you yourself are miserable. The very best way to assure the happiness of others is to be happy yourself and then to share your happiness with them. Suffering and self-sacrifice merely depress and discourage other people. If you want to make others happy, start by living the kind of life and doing the kinds of things that make you happy.
LET HAPPINESS BE YOUR GUIDE Make happiness the organizing principle of your life. That is, compare every possible action and decision against your standard of happiness to see whether it would make you happier or unhappier. Soon, you will discover that almost all the problems in your life come from choices that you have made — or are currently making — that do not contribute to your happiness.
There will of course be countless times when you will have to do little things that don’t make you happy in pursuit of your larger happiness. However, as Earl Nightingale said, “Happiness is the progressive realization of a worthy ideal.” You feel really happy only when you are moving, step by- step, toward the accomplishment of clearly defined goals that you feel will enhance the quality of your happiness. Since you can’t be truly happy until you are clear about your inherent possibilities, it’s important that you take some time on a regular basis to analyze yourself and identify your strengths and weaknesses.
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There is an old saying, “Success leaves tracks.” You can look back on your life and identify who you really are and what you should be doing with your life. One of the best ways to do this is to constantly ask yourself this powerful question:
“WHAT ONE GREAT THING WOULD I DARE TO DREAM IF I KNEW I COULD NOT FAIL?
Imagine that you are absolutely guaranteed success in the pursuit of a particular goal, big or small, short-term or long-term. Imagine that you have all the money, all the time, all the education, all the contacts, all the resources, and everything else that you could possibly need to achieve any one big goal in life.
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What would it be? This is a very important question because when you remove the limitation from your thinking, you often get a very clear idea of exactly what you should be doing with your life. Your greatest dream is an indication of your natural abilities and of what is really important to you. All successful men and women are big dreamers. They imagine what their fortune could be, ideal in every respect, and then they work every day toward their distant vision, goal or purpose. Step-by-step realization of their ideal makes them genuinely happy.
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LIFE’S 4 CATEGORIES Dr. Viktor Frankl, who wrote the book Man’s Search for Meaning, said that you can divide the thing you do in life into four categories. The first category consists of the things that are hard to learn and hard to do. An example for many people is mathematics. Many of us struggled with math in school and still struggle with bookkeeping, accounting, financial statements, and tax returns as adults. If you find mathematics hard to learn and hard to do, this is the sort of activity for which you are clearly unsuited. No matter how much of it you do, or how good you get at it, you will never achieve any lasting satisfaction or happiness from it.
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The next category consists of things that are hard to learn but easy to do. Riding a bicycle, driving a car, and tying your shoes are hard to learn but easy to do once you’ve practiced enough. These are seldom the sort of activities that cause you to feel terrific about yourself when you engage in them. They do not demand your best. The third category consists of things that are easy to learn but hard to do.
Physical labor falls into this category. Digging a ditch with a shovel and chopping wood with an ax are easy to learn but they are hard to do, and never get any easier. The fourth category is the key. These are things that are easy to learn and easy to do. You seem to have a natural proclivity for them. When you are engaged in this sort of activity, time flies. The things that are easy for you to learn and do are the sort of things that you should be doing with your life. They indicate where your natural talents and abilities lie. Engaging in these activities with your whole heart, and committing yourself to become better and better, will give you all the joy, satisfaction, and happiness you could want in life.
HAPPINESS IS NOT AN ACCIDENT Everyone has an area of excellence. Everyone has something that he or she can do in an outstanding fashion. It may take weeks, months, or even years for you to develop yourself in that area so that you can really perform in an extraordinary fashion, but you will be strongly attracted to that sort of activity from the beginning. You will enjoy reading about it and talking about it and thinking about it. You will find yourself admiring people who are outstanding in that area. You will look longingly at that field and wonder what it would be like to be in it and to be successful at it.
That is very often your heart’s desire. That area of activity where you can become excellent is probably what you were put on this earth to do. So resolve to persist until you succeed. The first part of courage is the resolve to launch in faith toward your objectives; the second part is your willingness to endure in the face of the inevitable disappointments and setbacks you will encounter on the road. Happiness is not an accident. Happy people are those who deliberately do the things that invariably lead to happiness. Happy people are those who know what they want and then throw their whole hearts into using their unique talents and abilities to make a contribution to the world in the achievement of their goals. You are put on this earth with a special purpose, programmed with unique talents and abilities that have not yet been fully tapped and utilized. When you focus all your energies on unlocking your true potential, you can claim your ultimate birthright: happiness
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