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

CHAPTER EIGHT t T he Importance of Useful Work—The Social and Sexual Tasks— The Battle-front of Life—The Concept of “ Distance ”—About “ Nervous Breakdowns ”—The Holiday Neurosis—About Idlers— Of Sexual Virtuosity—Emergency Exits of the Soul—Normal Sex Relationships—The Inter-relation of Human Problems—Catalogue of Side-shows—Why “ Normality ” Pays. 4 haye sp°ken a great deal of the goals of the Y ▼ individual personality, and in the last chapter illustrated both the various goals of human striving and the coincident philosophic formulas that help men to attain their ends. In our first chapter we showed that there were certain laws governing all human conduct. Are there also certain goals common to all human beings ? Are there certain tasks that every man and woman must solve, no matter what the individual goal ? Is there a human goal which is coincident with human happiness ? Our unique situation in the cosmos actually does challenge each of us with three great problems which must be satisfactorily and adequately solved if we would attain the good life and the happiness attendant thereon. These problems are the problems of work, society, and sex. They are peculiarly human problems based on the interaction between our characteristic constitution as human beings and the nature of the world in which we live. The first of these problems arises out of the fact that, in all except a few favoured places on the Equator, man must either work or starve. Man’s brain is not adequate to the solution of the problem of life itself. We do not know why we keep on living, nor do we know the nature of man’s place in the economy of the cosmos. But this we do know ; being alive, we must work to keep alive.