How to be happy though human / by W. Béran Wolfe.

they attain the fiction : “I could accomplish as much as my neighbour if I were not lazy.” On occasion they work very hard just to show that they can do their jobs when they feel like it, thus proving tfye validity of their laziness. If you are a great egoist the inflation of your ego is the only reward work offers you, and if you can inflate your ego by any of the spurious devices of laziness, changing of jobs, procrastination, indecision, stubborn¬ ness, dilettantism, criticism, fault-finding, or by setting up impossible conditions under which you will deign to work, you accomplish your end much more cheaply and much more effectively than if you had a little more courage and set out to batter down some real obstacles and made a profession of some socially useful work that would help satisfy your personal need for significance. The Sexual Side-shows The sexual side-shows are the last resorts of the discouraged because in these narrow arenas subjective superiority can be bought very cheaply. The tendency of our age is to exaggerate the importance of sexuality, and to many human beings sexual virility and human validity are synonymous. That sexual virility and the normal experience of passion are part of the good life goes without saying, but to the discouraged who are seeking solely subjective, make-believe values in life, the semblance of sexual virility is mistakenly considered an index of human worth-whileness. Because of this common mistake, and also because the sexual arena is the sole arena in which no one is compelled by nature either to do his act or lose his life, deserters from the main fronts of life are chiefly interested in establishing a spurious sense of their sexual importance. Such men and women hope that they can cajole themselves and their neighbours into admitting that their sexual virtuosity carries over into the other fields of human endeavour, and bespeaks a virtuosity in the fine art of being human as well. The sexual side-shows may be divided (i) into those which are evasions of the problems of love and marriage,