Chapter 17 Chapter Sixteen Effort and Giving Up

The golden mean is a dull doctrine, and I remember rejecting it with contempt and indignation in my youth, when I worshiped heroic extremism.Truths, however, are not always interesting, although there is not much else to prove them. The mean is an example of this: it may be a dull doctrine, but in many facts it is truth. One of the reasons why the golden mean must be maintained is due to the need to maintain a balance of effort and giving up.Both have extreme advocates.It is saints and mystics who advocate renunciation; efficiency experts and strong Christians advocate effort.These two opposing schools each have a part of the truth, but not the whole truth.In this chapter, I try to find a balance.Let's start with the effort first.

With rare exceptions, happiness is not like ripe fruit that falls into your mouth simply by the action of lucky circumstances.That's why I called this book "The Conquest of Happiness".Since the world is full of so much doom, some avoidable and some unavoidable, and so much disease and psychosis, so much strife, poverty, and hatred, a man who wants to be The happy man must find some way of coping with the many misfortunes that befell us all.On rare occasions, happiness comes effortlessly.A mild-tempered man, with a large inheritance, good health, and simple tastes, can walk comfortably through the halls of life, oblivious of what people are busily going about.A good-looking woman who has never been too lazy to work can enjoy the same enjoyment if she happens to marry a wealthy husband who does not require her to work, and if she is not afraid of getting fat after marriage and has good luck in having children. A kind of lazy happiness.But such cases are rare.Most people are not rich, and many people are not easy-going by nature, or have restless emotions, which make them unable to bear a quiet and rhythmic boring life.And the blessing of health is not available to everyone, and marriage is not the source of happiness.For all these reasons, whether for men or women, their happiness must be a pursuit, not a gift of God, in which both internal and external efforts have a great part to play.Internal efforts may involve necessary renunciations, so for now we only discuss external efforts.

Anyone, man or woman, has to work to survive, and in this case, there is no need to stress the point of hard work.It is true that Thapatzen of India does not have to work hard to survive, he just needs to hold out his bowl and accept the alms of the devotees.However, in Western countries, the authorities do not approve of this way of earning income.At the same time, the climate of the West also makes this method less fun, because it is not like hot and dry countries: in any case, in winter, almost no one is so lazy that they would rather go out and hang out than have a heater. work in the room.So, simply giving up is not a path to happiness in the West.

For the vast majority of people in Western countries, just having enough food and clothing is not enough to bring happiness, because they also need to feel successful.In some occupations, such as scientific research, those who do not earn a lot of money can get this feeling, but in most occupations, income becomes the measure of success.At this point we have touched on the fact that, in the vast majority of cases, a modest renunciation is necessary and acceptable since only a few achieve spectacular success in this competitive world of. In marriage, effort may or may not be necessary, depending on the circumstances.Where there is a minority of one sex, as men in England and women in Australia, people of that sex generally get married as they wish without any effort.However, if there is a majority of persons of this sex, the situation is reversed.Whoever studies the advertisements in the women's magazines will easily see that, where women are in the majority, it takes a great deal of effort and care if any one of them wishes to marry.Where men are in the majority, they often resort to more straightforward means of achieving marriage, such as the use of pistols.This is natural, since most men are constantly on the fringes of civilization.If a plague spared only men and made them a majority in England, I don't know what they would do;

The effort it takes to successfully raise a child is so obvious that no one would deny it.Countries that embrace renunciation and a misunderstood "spiritual" view of life have high child mortality rates.Medicines, sanitation, asepsis, proper food, etc., are impossible to obtain without relying on worldly occupations.These things enable one to acquire the energy and wisdom to cope with the material environment.Those who see matter as an illusion often ignore the existence of dust, and the result is the death of the child. More generally, one might think that the desire for power is the normal and legitimate aim of every human being, so long as his natural desires are not extinguished.What kind of power a man wishes to acquire depends on his dominant passion.Some people want the power to control the actions of others; some people want the power to control the thoughts of others; some people want the power to control the emotions of others.Some people want to change the material environment, and some people want to gain a sense of power through knowledge.Every worldly job involves some desire for power, unless it is done solely for the purpose of getting rich.A person who grieves for others purely because he has witnessed the tragic fate of mankind, his pain is sincere, and will long to alleviate human suffering.The only people who are completely indifferent to power are those who have no feeling for their fellow men.Therefore, some form of desire for power should be recognized when it is part of the quality of some people, because these people can build a better society.Any form of desire for power, if it is not thwarted, always involves a related form of effort.In the thinking of Westerners, this may be repeating the same old tune, but in Western countries, there are not a few people who flirt with the so-called "Eastern wisdom", while Easterners are abandoning it.For these Westerners, everything we have said above is problematic.If so, the old tune is worth repeating.

Yet renunciation also plays a part, no less than that of effort, in the conquest of happiness.Though the wise man is unwilling to sit idly by in the face of preventable misfortunes, he is unwilling to waste time and energy on inevitable disasters, and even if these disasters themselves can be overcome, as long as they will cause time and energy to be exhausted. If he spends too much, so as to prevent him from pursuing greater goals, he will rather give in. Many people are anxious or excessively irritated by the little things that don't go well, and thus waste a lot of useful energy.Even in the pursuit of really important goals, one should not get so caught up in them that the thought of possible failure haunts one for a long time and threatens the peace of mind.Christianity tells people to obey God's will, and even those who do not accept this teaching should run through some kind of belief in their activities.In actual work, efficiency does not harmonize with our feelings about the work.To be honest, feelings are sometimes a stumbling block to efficiency.The proper attitude should be: do your best and leave the gains and losses to fate.Giving up comes in two forms, one from a sense of hopelessness and the other from stubborn hope.The former is bad and the latter is good.A person who has suffered utter failure and lost hope of great achievement may learn to give up in despair.If he has really learned this renunciation, he throws away all important activities, and covers his despair with religious teachings, or with the doctrine of feeling that the existence of God is the real goal of life.Yet no matter what disguises he uses to hide his inner sense of failure, he is ultimately useless and unhappy.People who base their renunciation on stubborn hope do it quite differently.Stubborn hope must be great and impersonal.No matter what I do, I may die, I may fall ill, I may be defeated by an opponent; or I may find myself on a foolish and fruitless path... Whatever the case may be, purely personal hopes are bound to be dashed, yet If individual hopes were only part of the great hope of humanity, then the shattering of individual hopes would not be a complete failure.A scientist hoping for great discoveries may fail.Or be shot in the head and have to give up his job, but if he sincerely wants scientific progress, not just personal contribution, he will be as hopeless as someone who studies purely for its own sake.A man need not be plunged into utter despair for having toiled for a very urgent innovation only to find that all his efforts have been wiped out by war, or that what he has worked so hard for will not appear in his lifetime. , as long as he is concerned about the fate of mankind, not just whether he can participate in it.

The giving up mentioned above is the hardest thing to do.Plus there are some wildernesses that are much easier to do.under these circumstances.Only minor goals are held back, while life's larger goals still present the prospect of success.For example, a man in an important job who is disturbed by marital misfortune cannot give up where he should; and if his work is really attractive, he should regard such occasional troubles as wet Whoever makes a big fuss about such annoying little things as the weather is really stupid. Some of us can't stand the little annoyances that, if we let them, make up the vast majority of our lives.If these people miss the train, they will fly into a rage; The industrial system retaliates.The energies these people waste on petty annoyances can, if wisely and wisely spent, make or break an empire.A wise man does not notice that the maid has not dusted, the cook has not boiled the potatoes, and the broom has not swept away the smoke.I do not mean that he would not do something to remedy it, even if he had time.I'm just saying he treats them unemotionally.Anxiety, irritability, and anger are all useless solutions.Those who feel these emotions strongly may say that they cannot overcome them, and I do not know of any way to overcome them except that radical renunciation already mentioned.Concentration on the realization of great, impersonal hopes not only enables a man to bear failure in his personal work, or misfortune in his marriage, but also keeps him from being irritable when he misses his train or drops his umbrella in the mud disturbed.If he is of a violent nature, there is nothing I can do but this.

A person who is freed from the kingdom of anxiety will find that life is far more pleasant and easier than when he is hurt all the time.The strange cancer of acquaintances used to make him want to cry, but now he just finds it funny.When someone tells the anecdote of the Bishop of Fuego for the 347th time, he amuses himself by noticing the number of times he pays attention, and does not want to divert him by saying that he has nothing to say about the story.In his haste to catch an early train, his shoelace snapped, and he grunted briefly before realizing that, in the vastness of the universe, this trifle was of no great importance after all.He was in the middle of proposing marriage, and when the proposal was interrupted by the sudden visit of a distasteful neighbor, it occurred to him that this misfortune could happen to all people—except Adam, of course, but he had his own troubles.Relying on strange tropes and bizarre analogies, one can find solace in little misfortunes infinitely.It seems to me that every man and woman in a civilized society has a portrait of her own, and that the master is irritated when something tries to desecrate it.The best remedy for this annoyance is not to have just one picture, but to expand it into a gallery, picking pictures as they arise.It would be best if some of these portraits were ridiculous, for the man who sees himself all day long as the noble hero of tragedy is really unwise.That doesn't mean, however, that one should think of oneself as the clown in a comedy, because that's more disgusting.It takes a little tact to pick the right character for the situation.Of course, it is admirable if you can completely forget yourself and not play any role.However, if role-playing has become second nature, then you should avoid monotony by thinking that you are doing the whole show.

Many energetic people feel that even the slightest renunciation, the most tasteful humor, will drain the energy with which they work and, as they believe, impair the determination with which they can succeed.These people, in my opinion, they are wrong.Work that is worth doing can be done successfully even by those who have not deluded themselves about its importance, or about the ease with which it can be done.And those who can work only by self-deception, had better learn how to accept the truth before starting their work, and then go on with their work, because the need to be supported by deceitful nonsense will sooner or later make their work become harmful.Since it is harmful, it is better to do nothing at all.Half the good work in the world is fighting against bad work.The little time spent learning to discern the facts is not wasted, for what is then done is less likely to be harmful, and those who need a consistent inflation of the ego to stimulate their energies do differently.Facing the truth about yourself, although painful at first, ultimately offers you a protection—the only possible protection, really—from the disappointment and disillusionment that often accompanies self-deceived people.There's nothing more tiring, and more exasperating, than trying to believe something that's increasingly unbelievable every day.Renunciation of this effort is a necessary condition of secure and lasting happiness.