How to be happy though human / by W. Béran Wolfe.
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and value of all your experiences, you develop a “ training formula ” to help you on your way. This training formula is seldom consciously or verbally understood. It is an unconscious motto which you use to guide you through the multiple experiences of life. The happy man, who finds that he can compensate for his original sense of inferiority by cooperating with others, so contributing to society and to the welfare of the world, lives according to a formula that may be stated in its simplest form : “ I must be useful to my fellow-men to be happy and secure.” We could not recommend a better formula to anyone who wishes to attain happiness in this world. Not everyone has so simple and effective a training formula. The discouraged, the ignorant, and the fearful who make up most of the unhappy people in the world use very different training formulae. The boy who feels that his virility is somewhat under par, has a scheme of apperception which divides the world sharply into the neurotic dialectics of superior-inferior, masculine- feminine, strong-weak. This is one of the commonest and most mistaken schemes of apperception, one of the unhappy by-products of our patriarchal civiliza¬ tion. The training formula of an unhappy man who is always trying to prove that being a male and being superior are synonymous is : “I must be every inch a man 1 ” If you have met a man who lives according to this formula you know what unhappiness he suffers in his own life and what discord he spreads among his fellows. In order to carry out this formula the unhappy man who feels that his virility is in question, over-compensates and over-acts the “ masculine ” rdle, until his life becomes a caricature of masculinity. He puts on rough airs, dislikes everything aesthetic, prides himself on his obscene oaths and smutty stories which always show women in an inferior situation. He resents any expression of tender¬ ness, or interest in beauty. He goes to prize-fights, believes that it is necessary to “ hold his liquor well ” in order to be a man, considers all women (except his own