Are you living for happiness? What are you doing to produce happiness?
Are you dressing beyond your means; taking more “days off” than you can afford; buying more things than you need or can use? Are you eating and drinking solely for the pleasure of the palate, and for the enjoyment of the moment, and with no thought of what nourishes, or what clogs the system and produces disease?
Perhaps you say it takes all your strength and time to supply the mere “necessities of life”, and you are unhappy because of this fact. But what are the necessities of life?
Were you to be cast on a desert island, with plenty of good water, grains and fruit, honey and nuts, you would be surprised to find how little food it takes to supply the body with nourishment and to sustain good health. We do not care to live as we would if obliged to dwell upon a desert island, but that does not prove the luxuries in which we indulge are “life’s necessities.”
So, in thinking over your life and its hardships and obligations, do not put the blame on “life’s necessities” when you find you are using all your time and money and effort to merely live. You are really exhausting yourself by following standards set by others. This can never produce happiness.
If you wear yourself out in the struggle to buy a motor car, and to sustain one because your neighbors have this luxury, and not because your income and position make the car a suitable possession, you will never reach happiness. Happiness in material things comes only in having what we really need, when we really need it, and when we can really afford it.
Happiness comes from within the mind, never from without. That is an old, old statement, but it is eternally true. Happiness comes from self-respect, and self-respect comes from the knowledge that we are living within our means, that we owe no man money we cannot eventually pay, that we are able to enjoy the changing seasons without running in debt to keep up a variety of expensive homes at fashionable resorts, and that we are able to find pleasure in walking when we cannot ride, and in keeping at work when we cannot take a vacation.
Happiness lies in the consciousness of the privilege of life. Until you realize apart from all material considerations what a privilege life is, you cannot be happy.
Say over to yourself a dozen of the most familiar names of extravagantly wealthy people in America, and think of the miserable scandals and wretched domestic conditions which have been associated with some member of nearly every one of these families. Then you will be able to reason out how little wealth has to do with real happiness.
Happiness must rest on character, and character building lies in the power of the poorest man on earth.
Build yourself a splendid mansion of the mind; then, whether you live in a flat or a mansion, in a tent on the plains, in a tenement in the city or in a cottage by the sea, you will know the secret of happiness. And the world is full of ‘new thought” literature, which is a good foundation for happiness. Read, think, live rightly and happiness must come.
Ella Wheeler Wilcox, New Thought Common Sense, 1908