The Quest for Unearned Happiness

It is more than half a century since David Starr Jordan made some searching remarks on a pressingly important subject⎯”The Quest for Unearned Happiness [italics ours].”

“So long as man is alive and free,” he says, “he will, in one way or another, seek that which gives him pleasure. But . . . to seek is not necessarily to find . . . The basis of happiness is abundance of life, and abundance of life is a real thing, that cannot be shamed or counterfeited.”

And then he cites an inscription he had seen somewhere: “‘There is no pleasure in life equal to that of the conquest of a vicious habit.’ . . . This is the lesson,” he continues, “of a life of struggle against the temptation of self-indulgence. In general, the sinner is not the man who sets out . . . to be wicked . . . The sinner is the man who cannot say no. For sin to become wickedness is a matter of slow transition . . . It is because decay goes on step by step that bad men are not all bad, as good men are not wholly good . . . [And] the motive of most forms of sin is . . . the desire to make a short cut to happiness. Temptation promises pleasure without the effort of earning it. This promise has never been fulfilled in all the history of all the ages . . . Un earned pleasures are mere illusions . . . They leave >a dark brown taste’; . . . their recollection is >different in the morning.’ . . . But true happiness endures, and leaves no reaction of weakness and pain . . .”

One indispensable part of the pursuit of happiness is recognition of the fact that, as Emerson put it, “the world looks like . . . a mathematical equation, which, turn it how you will, balances itself.” It all adds up. Basically and ultimately there isn’t anything unearned.

Surely it is proper to pursue happiness. Indeed, true happiness is the eternal quest, the ultimate end. “Men are, that they might have joy.” What else would a loving Father⎯any loving Father⎯want for his children but genuine and enduring happiness and peace and progress? But as with all other things there is a law, a formula for it, and unearned happiness⎯happiness without virtue, without integrity, without effort, without inward and outward excellence⎯nowhere appears to be possible. As an ancient prophet put it: “Wickedness never was happiness.” (Neither was indolence, or indifference.)

There is no pleasure in life equal to that of the conquest of a bad habit.