`His Own Dispositions'

The 280th and final aphorism in Eric Hoffer’s second book, The Passionate State of Mind (1955), is a culmination of sorts, in a collection with seemingly little plot or conventional narrative drive. It may also stand as the truest sentence Hoffer ever wrote, a distillation of his self-schooled mental adventures and an ironically “happy ending”:

“The search for happiness is one of the chief sources of unhappiness.”

Few young people or the immature of any age could formulate such a thought or concede its conclusion. My sense is that happiness is beside the point – but so is unhappiness. I’ve learned from experience I’m most likely to fleetingly know happiness when I stop chasing it and do the next appropriate thing. Happiness, in short, is not a goal but an occasional byproduct of right living. Samuel Johnson intuited this in The Rambler #87, on Jan. 15, 1751:

“Little would be wanting to the happiness of life, if every man could conform to the right as soon as he was shown it.”

The corollary of dedicating one’s life to the pursuit of happiness is to forego happiness and substitute more accessible surrogates such as power and wealth. Has a wealthy or powerful man ever been convinced he possessed sufficient wealth or power? Johnson understood this as well, in The Rambler #203, on Feb. 25, 1752:

"It seems to be the fate of man to seek all his consolations in futurity. The time present is seldom able to fill desire or imagination with immediate enjoyment, and we are forced to supply its deficiencies by recollection or anticipation."

Finally, Johnson grasped that happiness is not a quality that exists autonomously in the world, like a bottle of elixir on the shelf waiting to be consumed. Rather, it is a quality of mind, a willingness to align oneself with the drift of the world. This is from The Rambler #6, on April 7, 1750:

“The fountain of content must spring up in the mind; and ... he, who has so little knowledge of human nature, as to seek happiness by changing any thing, but his own dispositions, will waste his life in fruitless efforts, and multiply the griefs which he purposes to remove."

It’s significant that both Johnson and Hoffer were not men of privilege. Both worked for their livings, with no sense of entitlement. Both were deeply learned and self-taught. Both knew the rare worth of happiness.