“The Seven Steps To Misery:”

wealth without work

pleasure without conscience

knowledge without character

Commerce without morality.

worship without sacrifice

politics without principle.”

Frederick Lewis Donaldson’s Seven Social Sins first read aloud in London’s Westminster Abbey in London 1925, is a heart-stabber for me to read now. It is impossible not to read these seven sins and not see everyone one of them practiced and increasingly dominant in our country.

We live in a moral hole inside of a whirlwind. That has never made anyone happy in the entire history of the world.

If anybody needs to know why the country is in such a miserable state, read Donaldson’s sermon and it will explain all of it to you. No wonder so many people are angry and unhappy.

Almost everyone I know seeks to live a happy life, including me, but there is hardly any universal-argument about what that means. Some people think it means money and security, others seek political power, some want fame and greatness.

At the moment, I’m happier than I’ve ever been so that gives me some clues as to what happiness means to me. I’m not here to tell you what happiness should mean to you, that’s your decision. We are all different.

I do hope to share my ideas about what happiness is.

To me, happiness is not a tangible thing but a state of mind, a sense of contentment,  meaning, and well-being. It’s a way of looking at the world and my life as a whole, not just in pieces.

This week I’ve been reading the essays and teachings of Seneca, the great Roman philosopher; his work is full of gems of wisdom and insight that make me stop and think about who I am and who I wish to be.

I never thought of happiness as the defining factor of a good life.

I’m often excited but not always happy, and it seems unrealistic to be satisfied all of the time.

For me, happiness works best alongside sadness and disappointment; one nourishes and defines the other. Just as Spring is a miracle following winter, happiness is the most powerful for me when it follows sorrow or pain. To think I can be happy all the time is a sure road to failure.

Robert Heinlein defined happiness as the condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own. Lincoln said people are usually as happy as they make up their minds to be. Hemingway said happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know. Ouch.

Other ideas about happiness – even from great thinkers –  often don’t work for me. I needed to define the idea for myself.

It’s easy for privileged people to sit around and define happiness when that is an absurdly impossible fantasy for most people on the earth. How does one tell the 61 million people in refugee camps or the billions in impoverished, brutal, and disintegrating cultures to live a happy life? How does one tell a starving mother in Africa how to be happy?

The very notion is a luxury, most often for the privileged, who take eating and shelter for granted. They are free to pursue a happy life. Most people aren’t.

I guess that makes me privileged and fortunate.

Still, the idea is compelling because even if it isn’t attainable, there are things to learn and consider.

Seneca has a different idea, and it interests me because I think it is more plausible and realistic. He doesn’t argue that we need wealth and fame or great success.

To Seneca, the happy life is one of self-sufficiency and abiding tranquility. This, he says, “is the gift of the greatness of soul, the gift of constancy which perseveres in a course judged right.” How, he asks, can this be attained?

He believed, as I do,  in seeking a moral life and using it as a guide to living and decision-making. Happiness is a gift to the soul I think.

I can’t say I’m right in my choices, I’m not that wise or strong,  my trail is stained and marked by mistakes. But I seek a moral and meaningful life – a life marked by love – as the beginning of my search for happiness.

“By surveying truth in its entirety, by safeguarding in every action, order, measure, decorum, a will that is without malice and benign,  focused undeviatingly upon reason, at once amiable and admirable.” That, to Seneca, is the path to happiness.

I like the formula. Sometimes, I can do that.

He writes that the sound and wise man’s soul must have the quality of a god’s. What can a man desire if he possesses everything honorable? If the dishonorable can contribute to the state, then the happy life is compromised.

“And what,” he asks, “could be meaner or stupider than the weave the good of the rational soul out of irrational strands.” Stupid indeed.

The founding fathers said we will get the government we deserve. Time to start thinking about building our happy lives in the middle of a maelstrom. A spiritual, not political, challenge. There is no happy place for me any longer in our political system.

The idea of honor, once an important part of American politics, is almost completely gone from our leaders. Their goal is survival, money, and power. I don’t see too many happy people in politics or many happy followers.

Reading these words, I had this strange feeling that the ghost of Seneca was alive and offering commentary on the moral poisoning spreading through our country and compromising our democracy. The dishonorable are not only contributing to the state; they are determined to run it, and how good or effective can that be? More unhappy people.

What was once unacceptable is now admirable, what was once outrageous is the new morality. Happiness, as I know it, exists outside of this corrupted system. That doesn’t mean it isn’t there.

In my writing, and in my life I strive – and often fail – to be both honorable and rational. I’m working hard to get better.

Those are not my achievements, but my goals. Sometimes I make it, very often not. The big thing I’ve learned about a happy life is that it takes a lot of unhappiness to figure it out and find it, and then live it. Pssst..the happy life is not always happy. We aren’t God.

One other thing I have learned about happiness: one must find and surround him or herself with positive, loving, and empathetic people. Angry and petty and small-minded people can suck one down quicker than a storm drains after a typhoon.

I seek out positive and compassionate people and fill my life with them in every way I can. Love and decency are the good pandemics, they spread just as quickly.

People who speak poorly of their lives, who speak poorly of others, who live without compassion or empathy are poison for me. I just can’t be around them. I soak up the optimism, hope, and kindness of human beings, it is everywhere. Finding positive and hopeful people is a major step towards being happy.

To me, happy life requires moral courage and great determination. And three other things: someone to love, something worthwhile to do, and something to hope for. A moral life is uplifting, that is another step to happiness.

A moral life – or morality in life –  is tranquil; it is governed by principle, not by money, fame, or brute power. It holds fast even amid significant change. The simple and honest life is less stressful, less fraught, less draining. The Amish are teaching me that.

I am happy because I am doing what I love, not what makes me rich.

I am happy because I accepted love in my life and searched for it until it found me. I am happy because there is a moral underpinning to the life I am trying to live even if I can’t always succeed in holding it together.

Power and money are not essential to a happy life, as Seneca argues. Our leaders have pushed reason and truth aside and made the supreme good of the people a thing that is both spineless and ignoble, “a monstrous hybrid, compounded of ill-assorted and badly joined members.”

We live in a different world than Seneca. Money is important if we are to live and do our work. We don’t live in cabins and stone houses anymore, we need money to function be mobile, to get online, to reach other people, to be creative, earn the money necessary for survival.

But still, I think Seneca is right, even prescient. His ideas apply very much to us now.

A community governed by power and grievance and greed can’t make people happy or inspire them to try to find a moral foundation for their lives, other than revenge and argument.

I can’t do much about the world around me, but I can shape my own life and am trying in the way Seneca suggests: I  work for self-sufficiency and independence, I embrace no labels or parties pre-fabricated ideologies.

I think for myself, and I see t tranquility by embracing a will without malice or conspiracy or the pursuit of power. I seek to do good every day.

Thanks to an army of good people, I have succeeded in that beyond my expectation. It isn’t hard, it doesn’t always take money. It does feel good, and it does bring peace of mind. Ever since I  began working hard to remove anger from my life, I have been happier, stronger, and made more room in my life for meaning. I’m not a saint and not seeking sainthood.

For me, being happy and doing good has become the same thing. I still get angry, am still judgemental, I still have little patience for people I think are fools. There is still anger in me.  I still have lots of work to do.

Yet I am happier than I have ever been in my life, and that has lessons for me. I don’t tell other people what to do, especially people I don’t know. I can only share my process honestly and openly.

This is the work I need to do by myself, hopefully with the help of people who feel the same way. We have done a lot, we will be asked to do a lot more, we will do a lot more, I believe.

That will make me happy. I hope it makes other people happy as well.

____

The photo above: the three symbols that hang on my chest every day of my life: On the left, the word “gratitude” written in basic software code on a platinum form to remind me to be grateful; a small, ancient Roman Cross, and an onyx cross that came to me recently. These remind me to keep my faith with good and to follow the teachings of Jesus Christ. I don’t worship him, and my idea of happiness is not a religious one, but a practical and sectarian one; I follow his call for empathy and compassion for the needy and the vulnerable. His message is mainly lost in America, but where it lives, it shines..)