WHAT EVER HAPPENED TO THE PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS?
James R. Fisher, Jr. © December 2003
The delight of having readers:
Someone wrote to me out of the blue and referenced this essay of mine, which I could not find. Alas, Canadian George Daly found it among his archives and e-mailed it to me.
This was all initiated by a reader of whom I hadn’t heard from for some time.
She writes:
Two times today, my thoughts were with you.....and now wondering how you two are faring during this difficult time.
The first time when I sent an email to a friend ending the note with the hopes of them being safe and to be well along with wishes for a happier new year. Then, I found a copy of your article “What ever happened to the pursuit of happiness?" written December 2013.
Rereading it , I found good thoughts that are certainly applicable today ..... maybe even more so.
Anyhow, I just wanted to say I am thinking of you both, trust you are well and managing to cope with what is happening to our great country and the world. Thus far, I am fine, missing Bill, of course, but he is with me, I know. The family is supportive and attentive and I am grateful for friendships and good health.
My best wishes to you both along with your closing and now mine too.
Be well,
Mary
HAPPINESS as I remember it.
When I was a little boy, I was told by my da that our forefathers, to make as many people as possible happy and content, established American democracy.
It was during the Great Depression. In retrospect, it seems incongruous. Out of work but undaunted, he remained secure in the glory of the Declaration of Independence. He read this to me then:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
This declaration became the bible of my existence and blueprint to a long and fulfilling life. My wonder now, however, is what ever happened to that pursuit?
How many are yawning at the suggestion of this rhetorical question? If you are between the ages of 25 and 54, it is likely that you are. Pollsters tell us you are blasé about politics, bored to death with the media, and distrustful of government as if government is an entity beyond your concern, when you in fact are the government.
Consequently, when it comes to media coverage, you would prefer watching reruns of “The Simpsons,” “That 70’s Show” and “Friends” than tune into NBC, ABC or CBS nightly news between the hours of 6 and 8 pm.
At least that is the case in the Tampa Bay region here in Florida according to television critic, Walt Belcher. Is Tampa Bay an isolated case? I don’t think so. Nor do I think many men in this group, if they read newspapers at all, read much beyond the sports page or women other than the entertainment section. Call this sexist if you like, but prove me wrong. I don’t think you can.
Granted, I’m beyond advertisers’ gold fingers. I must confess I don’t watch much network news, preferring BBC World News, World News from Berlin, and the Jim Lehrer News Hour, all on PBS. The world news from London and Berlin provide another perspective, while the Jim Lehrer News Hour gives a balanced account of national and international news with opinion makers on all sides of an issue participating.
Inflation, depression, revolution and all matters of folly do not affect me to the degree they do the 25 to 54 age group. My slow boat has already left shore. Yet, it is me who is paying attention while those with the most to lose seemingly are otherwise occupied.
Syndicated columnist, Charley Reese, sometimes outrageous and always outspoken, who doesn’t fit into any comfortably predictable point of view, aims to dislodge preoccupation and let thoughtful consideration come forward. Recently, he wrote:
“Right now, the view among political, business and media elites is that the goal in life is to make as much money as possible and to accumulate as many toys as possible. The media are fascinated by the rich and often fawn over them. Politicians are always talking about economic prosperity as if that was the main goal of government. Business people watch every little blip of the stock market like a casino operator watches the daily take. Statistics are poured over like a fortuneteller looking at tealeaves.”
In other words the pursuit of wealth has been made synonymous with the pursuit of happiness. But does this pursuit have legs?
There is a great confusion between need and want. The American ethic would have you trade in a perfectly serviceable automobile (definition of need) for a bigger, more expensive, more powerful, and more enviable machine (definition of want) simply because you can. I was told only the other day that a friend of my daughter’s, now married, and just 30, has sold his $250,000 home for a $500,000 replacement because “he can afford it” on his $100,000 income. Need was not in the equation.
He who has the most toys is the winner, or is he?
The other night on the PBS Jim Lehrer News Hour there was a segment “Jobs on the Move.” It was about the hundreds of thousands of jobs of professional workers earning from $50,000 to $250,000 moving to such places as India. Why India?
First, India has a larger professional workforce of administrators, managers, engineers and scientists than the entire American work force – 150 million workers. Second, Indians will work for 10 percent of what their professional counterparts in the United States are paid. Third, while Americans are sleeping it is the workday in India.
So, in this new electronic age, enterprise can be covered 24 hours a day without sleep. This has telling consequences. A management consultant on the program envisioned between 3 and 5 million such high paying jobs leaving the US permanently in the next few years.
It is no longer manual laborers in the textile industry or blue-collar workers in manufacturing jobs across the nation who are vulnerable, but the best and the brightest our universities can produce. Are these 25 to 54 year old workers paying attention?
To put this into graphic terms, doctors can dictate their notes electronically, and while they sleep, have them transcribed in India, to be picked up in the morning before they make their rounds. Cost: $100/hour in the US versus $6/hour in India.
While the 24 to 54 age group is buying bigger and bigger houses, more and more expensive clothes, purchasing gas guzzling luxury cars and boats, playing golf, jet skiing or acquiring fashionable vacation homes in the sun, somebody else is eating their breakfast, and if they don’t watch out maybe their lunch and dinner as well.
We have had a 50-year aberration, which coincidentally corresponds to Hugh Hefner’s 50th anniversary of his creation of Playboy magazine, followed by the hedonistic paradise fostered by Playboy Enterprises. Hefner claims in a recent Time Magazine article that he doesn’t have a wife, but six girlfriends, none of whom is older than the age of a great granddaughter. I can imagine the 25 to 54 crowd laughing, “More power to you, Hef!”
Somehow lost in the pursuit of happiness, the idea has evolved – Hefner didn’t invent it – that “free love” was the ticket to happiness; that we were too uptight, too regimented, too constrained for our own good. The “sexual revolution” proved sex was neither love nor free, if you equate it with the rise in venereal disease, broken marriages, shattered lives of men as well as women, with the belief that any inconvenience or disagreement is meant for the parties to move on, not to work out their differences; that the way to peace is through the avoidance of pain, not through the embrace of fear.
Something is wrong with this picture. The world is catching up with the United States. It was bound to happen. Computers and electronics have perhaps speeded up the process by as much as 50 years. In time, wages about the world will come into balance. In time, new jobs will be created requiring different tools and skills, changing the calculus of this eternal flux. In time, it will prove insane to hide behind protective tariffs and “us against them” games. In time, we will realize we are part of a mutually interdependent global village. In time, Americans will have no other choice than to finally grow up.
What is the spice of life? Is it toys? Is it conspicuous consumption? Americans are 5 percent of the world’s population consuming 25 percent of the world's fossil fuel. Is it graduating more MBAs than the rest of the world combined, while foreign students dominate our universities, arguably the best in the world, in mathematics and science programs?
The spice of life, says Dr. Hans Selye, world-renowned pioneer in biological science, is stress. Without stress, there is no life and we are all vegetables. The absence of stress does not produce happiness, but is more likely to lead to distress. This is simply a matter of mismanaged stress. It produces ulcers, heart disease and other ailments.
There is the belief that the pursuit of happiness involves having the most toys, the ideal job, the perfect marriage, and the freest time without any care in the world. Wrong!
Just as there is confusion between need and want there is similar confusion between aims and means. Selye writes,
“To start with, a clear distinction must be made between our final aims – the ultimate achievements that give purpose to life – and the means through which we hope to attain them. For example, money is never a final aim; it has no value in itself. It can only act as a means, helping us to reach some ultimate goal which, to us, has inherent value.”
The pursuit of happiness will bring no peace of mind if the differences between aims and means are not understood. Means are good only to reach some final accomplishment which deep in our soul we can truly respect. With happy people this is usually the urge for self-expression doing what brings them pleasure, and comfort to others, in other words some kind of work.
Dignity doesn’t come simply with a paycheck. Dignity comes with self-respect, and that comes, as Tampa Tribune editorial columnist Joseph Brown puts it, “with the best attitude even toward a minimum-wage job.” He quotes Martin Luther King:
“If you are called to be a street sweeper, sweep streets even as Michelangelo painted, or Beethoven composed music, or Shakespeare wrote poetry. Sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will pause to say, ‘Here lived a great street sweeper who did his job well.’”
There is nothing wrong with society producing millionaires or even billionaires. These entrepreneurs capture science, convert it into new technology, which generates the need for new tools, which in turn necessitates the development of new sets of skills.
Where it gets confusing is when people see the wealth of a Bill Gates and that is all they see. They don’t see a pioneer, risk taker, adventurer, philanthropist, only ostentatious wealth. They don’t see the pursuit of happiness as the journey that it is. They prefer instead to see it as an end in itself. They don’t see the hard work.
If hard work were missing, there would be no outlet to self-expression, which is fundamental to this pursuit. Nor do they see the cumulative effect of the constant embrace of adversity, challenge, setback and failure. These are fundamental in the pursuit of happiness; otherwise there would be no authentic long-range aim.
Several years ago, surrounding by my executive colleagues in a restaurant in Amsterdam, Holland, somebody said, “What would you really like to do?” Not one of us said it was what we were doing. It reminded me of the final lines of the Sinclair Lewis novel, Babbitt, where middle-aged real estate broker, George F. Babbitt confesses, “I never did a single thing in my whole life that I wanted to do.” The book was a social satire of the 1920s. It would appear Babbitt still lives.
* * * * *
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D., author of seven books in the genre of industrial psychology, has just written his first novel, In the Shadow of the Courthouse: Memoir of the 1940s Written as a Novel. He is a former corporate executive of Honeywell Europe, SA. His books are available on line with www.amazon.com, www.barnes&noble.com, www.borders.com, www.1stbooks.com, or at your favorite bookstore. He may be reached by email at TheDeltaGrpFL@cs.com
HAPPINESS as I remember it.
When I was a little boy, I was told by my da that our forefathers, to make as many people as possible happy and content, established American democracy.
It was during the Great Depression. In retrospect, it seems incongruous. Out of work but undaunted, he remained secure in the glory of the Declaration of Independence. He read this to me then:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
This declaration became the bible of my existence and blueprint to a long and fulfilling life. My wonder now, however, is what ever happened to that pursuit?
How many are yawning at the suggestion of this rhetorical question? If you are between the ages of 25 and 54, it is likely that you are. Pollsters tell us you are blasé about politics, bored to death with the media, and distrustful of government as if government is an entity beyond your concern, when you in fact are the government.
Consequently, when it comes to media coverage, you would prefer watching reruns of “The Simpsons,” “That 70’s Show” and “Friends” than tune into NBC, ABC or CBS nightly news between the hours of 6 and 8 pm.
At least that is the case in the Tampa Bay region here in Florida according to television critic, Walt Belcher. Is Tampa Bay an isolated case? I don’t think so. Nor do I think many men in this group, if they read newspapers at all, read much beyond the sports page or women other than the entertainment section. Call this sexist if you like, but prove me wrong. I don’t think you can.
Granted, I’m beyond advertisers’ gold fingers. I must confess I don’t watch much network news, preferring BBC World News, World News from Berlin, and the Jim Lehrer News Hour, all on PBS. The world news from London and Berlin provide another perspective, while the Jim Lehrer News Hour gives a balanced account of national and international news with opinion makers on all sides of an issue participating.
Inflation, depression, revolution and all matters of folly do not affect me to the degree they do the 25 to 54 age group. My slow boat has already left shore. Yet, it is me who is paying attention while those with the most to lose seemingly are otherwise occupied.
Syndicated columnist, Charley Reese, sometimes outrageous and always outspoken, who doesn’t fit into any comfortably predictable point of view, aims to dislodge preoccupation and let thoughtful consideration come forward. Recently, he wrote:
“Right now, the view among political, business and media elites is that the goal in life is to make as much money as possible and to accumulate as many toys as possible. The media are fascinated by the rich and often fawn over them. Politicians are always talking about economic prosperity as if that was the main goal of government. Business people watch every little blip of the stock market like a casino operator watches the daily take. Statistics are poured over like a fortuneteller looking at tealeaves.”
In other words the pursuit of wealth has been made synonymous with the pursuit of happiness. But does this pursuit have legs?
There is a great confusion between need and want. The American ethic would have you trade in a perfectly serviceable automobile (definition of need) for a bigger, more expensive, more powerful, and more enviable machine (definition of want) simply because you can. I was told only the other day that a friend of my daughter’s, now married, and just 30, has sold his $250,000 home for a $500,000 replacement because “he can afford it” on his $100,000 income. Need was not in the equation.
He who has the most toys is the winner, or is he?
The other night on the PBS Jim Lehrer News Hour there was a segment “Jobs on the Move.” It was about the hundreds of thousands of jobs of professional workers earning from $50,000 to $250,000 moving to such places as India. Why India?
First, India has a larger professional workforce of administrators, managers, engineers and scientists than the entire American work force – 150 million workers. Second, Indians will work for 10 percent of what their professional counterparts in the United States are paid. Third, while Americans are sleeping it is the workday in India.
So, in this new electronic age, enterprise can be covered 24 hours a day without sleep. This has telling consequences. A management consultant on the program envisioned between 3 and 5 million such high paying jobs leaving the US permanently in the next few years.
It is no longer manual laborers in the textile industry or blue-collar workers in manufacturing jobs across the nation who are vulnerable, but the best and the brightest our universities can produce. Are these 25 to 54 year old workers paying attention?
To put this into graphic terms, doctors can dictate their notes electronically, and while they sleep, have them transcribed in India, to be picked up in the morning before they make their rounds. Cost: $100/hour in the US versus $6/hour in India.
While the 24 to 54 age group is buying bigger and bigger houses, more and more expensive clothes, purchasing gas guzzling luxury cars and boats, playing golf, jet skiing or acquiring fashionable vacation homes in the sun, somebody else is eating their breakfast, and if they don’t watch out maybe their lunch and dinner as well.
We have had a 50-year aberration, which coincidentally corresponds to Hugh Hefner’s 50th anniversary of his creation of Playboy magazine, followed by the hedonistic paradise fostered by Playboy Enterprises. Hefner claims in a recent Time Magazine article that he doesn’t have a wife, but six girlfriends, none of whom is older than the age of a great granddaughter. I can imagine the 25 to 54 crowd laughing, “More power to you, Hef!”
Somehow lost in the pursuit of happiness, the idea has evolved – Hefner didn’t invent it – that “free love” was the ticket to happiness; that we were too uptight, too regimented, too constrained for our own good. The “sexual revolution” proved sex was neither love nor free, if you equate it with the rise in venereal disease, broken marriages, shattered lives of men as well as women, with the belief that any inconvenience or disagreement is meant for the parties to move on, not to work out their differences; that the way to peace is through the avoidance of pain, not through the embrace of fear.
Something is wrong with this picture. The world is catching up with the United States. It was bound to happen. Computers and electronics have perhaps speeded up the process by as much as 50 years. In time, wages about the world will come into balance. In time, new jobs will be created requiring different tools and skills, changing the calculus of this eternal flux. In time, it will prove insane to hide behind protective tariffs and “us against them” games. In time, we will realize we are part of a mutually interdependent global village. In time, Americans will have no other choice than to finally grow up.
What is the spice of life? Is it toys? Is it conspicuous consumption? Americans are 5 percent of the world’s population consuming 25 percent of the world's fossil fuel. Is it graduating more MBAs than the rest of the world combined, while foreign students dominate our universities, arguably the best in the world, in mathematics and science programs?
The spice of life, says Dr. Hans Selye, world-renowned pioneer in biological science, is stress. Without stress, there is no life and we are all vegetables. The absence of stress does not produce happiness, but is more likely to lead to distress. This is simply a matter of mismanaged stress. It produces ulcers, heart disease and other ailments.
There is the belief that the pursuit of happiness involves having the most toys, the ideal job, the perfect marriage, and the freest time without any care in the world. Wrong!
Just as there is confusion between need and want there is similar confusion between aims and means. Selye writes,
“To start with, a clear distinction must be made between our final aims – the ultimate achievements that give purpose to life – and the means through which we hope to attain them. For example, money is never a final aim; it has no value in itself. It can only act as a means, helping us to reach some ultimate goal which, to us, has inherent value.”
The pursuit of happiness will bring no peace of mind if the differences between aims and means are not understood. Means are good only to reach some final accomplishment which deep in our soul we can truly respect. With happy people this is usually the urge for self-expression doing what brings them pleasure, and comfort to others, in other words some kind of work.
Dignity doesn’t come simply with a paycheck. Dignity comes with self-respect, and that comes, as Tampa Tribune editorial columnist Joseph Brown puts it, “with the best attitude even toward a minimum-wage job.” He quotes Martin Luther King:
“If you are called to be a street sweeper, sweep streets even as Michelangelo painted, or Beethoven composed music, or Shakespeare wrote poetry. Sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will pause to say, ‘Here lived a great street sweeper who did his job well.’”
There is nothing wrong with society producing millionaires or even billionaires. These entrepreneurs capture science, convert it into new technology, which generates the need for new tools, which in turn necessitates the development of new sets of skills.
Where it gets confusing is when people see the wealth of a Bill Gates and that is all they see. They don’t see a pioneer, risk taker, adventurer, philanthropist, only ostentatious wealth. They don’t see the pursuit of happiness as the journey that it is. They prefer instead to see it as an end in itself. They don’t see the hard work.
If hard work were missing, there would be no outlet to self-expression, which is fundamental to this pursuit. Nor do they see the cumulative effect of the constant embrace of adversity, challenge, setback and failure. These are fundamental in the pursuit of happiness; otherwise there would be no authentic long-range aim.
Several years ago, surrounding by my executive colleagues in a restaurant in Amsterdam, Holland, somebody said, “What would you really like to do?” Not one of us said it was what we were doing. It reminded me of the final lines of the Sinclair Lewis novel, Babbitt, where middle-aged real estate broker, George F. Babbitt confesses, “I never did a single thing in my whole life that I wanted to do.” The book was a social satire of the 1920s. It would appear Babbitt still lives.
* * * * *
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D., author of seven books in the genre of industrial psychology, has just written his first novel, In the Shadow of the Courthouse: Memoir of the 1940s Written as a Novel. He is a former corporate executive of Honeywell Europe, SA. His books are available on line with www.amazon.com, www.barnes&noble.com, www.borders.com, www.1stbooks.com, or at your favorite bookstore. He may be reached by email at TheDeltaGrpFL@cs.com
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