If you look around at the men and women whom you can call happy, you will see that they all
have certain things in common. The most important of these things is an activity which at most
gradually builds up something that you are glad to see coming into existence. Women who take an
instinctive pleasure in their children can get this
kind of satisfaction out of bringing up a family.
Artists and authors and men of science get happiness in this way if their own work seems
good to them. But there are many humbler forms of the same kind of pleasure. Many men who
spend their working life in the city devote their weekends to voluntary and unremunerated toil in
their gardens, and when the spring comes, they experience all the joys of having created beauty.
The whole subject of happiness has, in my opinion, been treated too solemnly. It had been
thought that man cannot be happy without a theory of life or a religion. Perhaps those who have
been rendered unhappy by a bad theory may need a better theory to help them to recovery, just as
you may need a tonic when you have been ill. But when things are normal a man should be
healthy without a tonic and happy without a theory. It is the simple things that really matter. If a
man delights in his wife and children, has success in work, and finds pleasure in the alternation of
day and night, spring and autumn, he will be happy whatever his philosophy may be. If, on the
other hand, he finds his wife fateful, his children's noise unendurable, and the office a nightmare;
if in the daytime he longs for night, and at night sighs for the light of day, then what he needs is
not a new philosophy but a new regimen —a different diet, or more exercise, or what not. Man is
an animal, and his happiness depends on his physiology more than he likes to think. This is a
humble conclusion, but I cannot make myself disbelieve it. Unhappy businessmen, I am
convinced, would increase their happiness more by walking six miles every day than by any
conceivable change of philosophy.