A Human Strategy #532: Dying happy or living longer

532
There was a man whose prayer to “die happy” was granted.  He suddenly won the lottery, and quickly looked up in dread.  For the rest of his life he feared his happiness, preferring life.
There was another man who had one early but great achievement, where he had leapt up into newer, higher hopes, and was left with this one high standard which he thereafter failed to measure up to.

Popular posts from this blog

A valuable book, A Human Strategy, aphorism 387

387 A valuable book may be torn to pieces without diminishing the human spirit, just so long as the words have already been read and understood.  To feel the loss of the book — at its material destruction, even though one had already digested its contents fully and had aligned oneself toward its overall direction — is evidence that one values the non-human being over human becoming , the static thing over the dynamic process .  In response to the fear of our unknowable future we would rather freeze ourselves into a single stage of growth at the expense of the entire metamorphosis. A Human Strategy ** The Mechanics of Virtue ** Post-Atheism
Read more
The Ascetic Impulse: We think we deliberately hurt ourselves when it is simply that we do know which version of ourselves will satisfy our needs more fully. We try on a personality as if trying on new clothes. Bizarrely, the self we beat up has heretofore been a complete stranger.
Read more