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

demanded by the difficult tasks of living. Recreation, no matter in what form, is a desirable adjunct to the business of living, but it is never life itself. If you spend your life seeking pleasures, you quickly exhaust the available means of recreation. Boredom pursues you. The field of normal recreation soon becomes uninteresting, and the field of the pathological beckons alluringly. But even the pathological palls, and the only adventure left is the great adventure of Death. Suicide is the shadow of boredom born of pleasure-hunting and the satiation of pleasure- hunger. The meaning of life, significance in living, peace and happiness, are not to be found in the hedonistic side-shows. As in the case of the drug addict and the chronic alcoholic, the pleasure-intoxicated build their lives on the mistaken notion that life is unsatisfactory and vain. This is in itself the height of human vanity. Life declares no dividends until you have made an investment in the fine art of living. If you look at life as if it were a business, and consider it in terms of “ What can I get out of it ? ” you will sooner or later find yourself madly hunting either pleasure or power. The pleasure and the power neuroses are the commonest aberrations of human conduct in our present-day civilization. When pleasure and power as goals of life elude you, as they must because they are not things but qualities of the good life, you are likely to find yourself denying the validity of life itself. The gate then opens into the realms of pietism and mysticism. St. Augustine and St. Francis of Assisi, failing to attain their goals of significance by profligacy and the riotous pursuit of earthly pleasures, sought the same superlative significance in saintliness and the cult of poverty and piety. These techniques cannot be recom¬ mended to modern men and women. The founder of a well-known religious cult, unsuccessful in her quest for health, took refuge in the belief that disease does not exist, and died in her paranoid belief that she was the victim of malicious animal magnetism. Her tragedy lay