Go Back

At some point in your life you make a choice between happiness and knowledge. You decide which is more important to you. For some, no matter how happy Future Me is, if he or she is ignorant, we cringe. The happiness just makes the ignorance all the more disgusting. Some choose a middle path: “Maybe being ignorant is alright as long as I’m aware of it and constantly uneasy about everything.” — the worst of both worlds. You also see that a lot of people choose happiness over Knowledge (without even realizing it, obviously), and that’s kind of scary. But here’s the alternative: saying “yes” to your mind’s insatiable desire to understand, to roam unfettered over oceans and galaxies of knowledge, to make the tragic, glorious voyage to the South Pole of the Universe of Knowledge for no other reason than that it is the South Pole, and finally to die without ever understanding anything more clearly. Because while it seems to make for a more interesting story, the sad fact is that Happiness is acheivable — it’s at your fingertips, in fact — while Understanding is not.

The young mind plays so lightly on a ridge, one side of which leads to Heaven and the other to Hell. Heaven is nothing fancy — a porch that needs painting, a yard that needs cleaning before friends arrive from out of town for a few days. Hell is thousands of leagues away, along a road that leads along canyons and through island straits, a road that goes on and on, and can always be retraced. The way of self-challenge, of wrestling with the elements and the gods and one’s own nature to achieve Final Victory — what man or woman of any ability would not want that path? And who could stand to retrace the least part of it?

I raked my leaves and painted my porch. Friends came and it was sad to see them leave. This is happiness.

“I have perceived that in all cases man must eventually lower, or at least shift, his conceit of attainable felicity; not placing it anywhere in the intellect or the fancy; but in the wife, the heart, the bed, the table, the saddle, the fire-side, the country…”

— Moby Dick, ch. CXIV