The Road to Happiness
If you look around at the men and women whom youcan call happy, you will see that they all havecertain things in common. The most important ofthese things is an activity which at most graduallybuilds up something that you are glad to see cominginto existence. Women who take an instinctivepleasure in their children can get this kind ofsatisfaction out of bringing up a family.
Artists and authors and men of science get happinessin this way if their own work seems good to them. But there are many humbler forms of the same kind of pleasure. Many men who spend theirworking life in the city devote their weekends to voluntary and unremunerated toil in theirgardens, and when the spring comes, they experience all the joys of having created beauty.
The whole subject of happiness has, in my opinion,been treated too solemnly. It had beenthought that man cannot be happy without a theory of life or a religion. Perhaps those who havebeen rendered unhappy by a bad theory may need a better theory to help them to recovery, just as you may need a tonic when you have been ill. But when things are normal a man shouldbe healthy without a tonic and happy without a theory. It is the simple things that reallymatter. If a man delights in his wife and children, has success in work, and finds pleasure in thealternation of day and night, spring and autumn, he will be happy whatever his philosophy maybe. If, on the other hand, he finds his wife fateful, his children’s noise unendurable, and theoffice a nightmare; if in the daytime he longs for night, and at night sighs for the light of day, then what he needs is not a new philosophy but a new regimen —a different diet, or moreexercise, or what not. Man is an animal, and his happiness depends on his physiology morethan he likes to think. This is a humble conclusion, but I cannot make myself disbelieve it. Unhappy businessmen, I am convinced,would increase their happiness more by walking sixmiles every day than by any conceivable change of philosophy.
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