The Sunday Eight O'Clock/Happiness
UNTIL he was forty a neighbor of mine lived a happy, active, useful life. He had a good job at which he earned a salary sufficient to support his family comfortably. He was interested in community affairs, he was a useful citizen, he was enthusiastic over paying for the pretty house he had built, and his future seemed bright and satisfying.
Then, unfortunately, his aunt died and left him fifty thousand dollars. He gave up his job immediately, quit work, and set out to enjoy himself. The income from his legacy was scarcely as much as his salary had previously been, and as his leisure increased his desires multiplied quite disproportionately. He became discontented, nomadic, a lazy, useless citizen, who is happy nowhere. He spends his winters in Florida and his summers camping out in the woods or drifting up and down the river in a motor boat. He is bringing up his two boys to be unhappy loafers like himself. But he is a pathetic figure. He has not learned the lesson that there is no real happiness without work. The most unhappy discontented people I have ever known are those who have money enough to live on without following any regular daily occupation, and who put in their time looking for pleasure. The woman who has no occupation but bridge whist is a miserable creature, and the man who is trying to pay his obligations to the world by playing golf or billiards is an unhappy, discontented grouch. The most wretched men in the world are those who give up work before they are compelled to do so.
Sometimes when the days are hot and long and the tasks are hard and life seems too full of duties for us to fulfill them all we might be helped if we stopped long enough to realize that real happiness is always synonymous with work. It is the hard job, the difficult and often the disagreeable task that brings us joy in the accomplishment.
The greatest blessing that God ever bestowed upon fallen man was the privilege of earning his bread by the sweat of his brow. It was the best possible substitute for paradise.
October