These illustrations suggest four general maxims, which will prove an adequate preventive of persecution mania if their truth is sufficiently realized. The first is: remember that your motives are not always as altruistic as they seem to yourself. The second is: Don't overestimate your own merits. The third is: don't expect others to take as much interest in you as you do yourself. And the fourth is: don't imagine that most people give enough thought to you to have any desire to persecute you. It seems clear to me that marriage ought to be constituted by children, and relations not involving children ought to be ignored by the law and treated as indifferent by public opinion. It is only through children that relations cease to be a purely private matter. The businessman's religion and glory demand that he should make much money; therefore, like the Hindu widow, he suffers the torment gladly. If one lived for ever the joys of life would inevitably in the end lose their savour. As it is, they remain perennially fresh. With the wise man, what he has does not cease to be enjoyable because some one else has something else. Envy, in fact, is one form of vice, partly moral, partly intellectual, which consists in seeing things never in themselves but only in their relations”

The Conquest of Happiness by Bertrand Russell | Goodreads

Work, therefore, is desirable, first and foremost, as a preventive of boredom, for the boredom that a man feels when he is doing necessary though uninteresting work is as nothing in comparison with the boredom that he feels when he has nothing to do with his days. A little work directed to a good end is better than a great deal of work directed to a bad end, though the apostles of the strenuous life seem to think otherwise. Very few people can resist saying malicious things about their acquaintances, and even on occasion about their friends; yet when people hear that anything against themselves, they are filled with indignant amazement.

We can probably all verify that too many of the people we know are addicted to various ways of wasting time, just so that they don’t experience the monotony of their lives: computer games, TV shows, but also extensive holidays, dangerous and exciting hobbies, and even just getting drunk over the weekend, every weekend, are ways of combating monotony. On the other hand, the truly productive person needs to be able to concentrate, to sit still, to observe and wait. The scientist who waits for an experiment to finish; the poet who waits for inspiration and the right word; the gardener who has to wait for many months to see a seedling develop almost imperceptibly week for week; the painter who has to spend years painting bad pictures but persisting, until they finally have acquired the skill to master their art. By publishing your document, the content will be optimally indexed by Google via AI and sorted into the right category for over 500 million ePaper readers on YUMPU.

The Conquest of Happiness - Medium The Conquest of Happiness - Medium

Some texts are very funny. Deut. XXIV, 5: "When a man hath taken a new wife, he shall not go out to war, neither shall he be charged with any business: but he shall be free at home one year, and shall cheer up his wife which he hath taken." I should never have guessed "cheer up" was a Biblical expression. Here is another really inspiring text: "Cursed be he that lieth with his mother-in-law. And all the people shall say, Amen." St Paul on marriage: "I say therefore to the unmarried and widows, It is good for them if they abide even as I. But if they cannot contain, let them marry: for it is better to marry than to burn." This has remained the doctrine of the Church to this day. It is clear that the Divine purpose in the text "it is better to marry than to burn" is to make us all feel how very dreadful the torments of Hell must be. Of all evils of war the greatest is the purely spiritual evil: the hatred, the injustice, the repudiation of truth, the artificial conflict. The life of man is a long march through the night, surrounded by invisible foes, tortured by weariness and pain, towards a goal that few can hope to reach, and where none may tarry long. After all, what is more enviable than happiness? And if I can cure myself of envy I can acquire happiess and become enviable. The man who has double my salary is doubtless tortured by the thought that someone else in turn has twice as much as he has, and so it goes on. If you desire glory, you may envy Napoleon. But Napoleon envied Caesar, Caesar envied Alexander, and Alexander, I daresay, envied Hercules, who never existed. You cannot, therefore, get away from envy by means of success alone, for there will always be in history or legend some person even more successful than you are. You can get away from envy by enjoying the pleasures that come your way, by doing the work that you have to do, and by avoiding comparisons with those whom you imagine, perhaps quite falsely, to be more fortunate than yourself This is an interesting thought in the present-day debate about the unemployment due to AI taking away our jobs and the discussion around a universal basic income. A universal basic income surely will be a welcome solution to the economic problems from unemployment. But is that all that counts? Or does work, as Russell thinks, have more to give us than money? How does work contribute to our happiness? Russell identifies two different ways how work enriches our lives:It is preoccupation with possessions, more than anything else, that prevents men from living freely and nobly. The State and Property are the great embodiments of possessiveness; it is for this reason that they are against life, and that they issue in war. Possession means taking or keeping some good thing which another is prevented from enjoying; creation means putting into the world a good thing which otherwise no one would be able to enjoy. Since the material goods of the world must be divided among the population, and since some men are by nature brigands, there must be defensive possession, which will be regulated, in a good community, by some principle of impersonal justice. But all this is only the preface to a good life or good political institutions, in which creation will altogether outweigh possession, and distributive justice will exist as an uninteresting matter of course. The secret of happiness is very simply this: let your interests be as wide as possible, and let your reactions to the things and persons that interest you be as far as possible friendly rather than hostile” I have frequently experienced myself the mood in which I felt that all is vanity; I have emerged from it not by means of any philosophy, but owing to some imperative necessity of action. If your child is ill, you may be unhappy, but you will not feel that all is vanity; you will feel that the restoring of the child to health is a matter to be attended to regardless of the question whether there is ultimate value in human life or not. The happy man is the man who lives objectively, who has free affections and wide interests, who secures his happiness through these interests and affections and through the fact that they, in turn, make him an object of interest and affection to many others. Provided work is not excessive in amount, even the dullest work is to most people less painful than idleness. (…) **Work, therefore, is desirable, first and foremost, as a preventive of boredom, for the boredom that a man feels when he is doing necessary though uninteresting work is as nothing in comparison with the boredom that he feels when he has nothing to do with his days.”