"The
blessing of labor is that effort and gratification follow each other as closely
as producing and consuming the means of subsistence, so that happiness is a
concomitant of the process itself, just as pleasure is a concomitant of the
functioning of a healthy body….The right to the pursuit of this happiness is
indeed as undeniable as the right to life; it is even identical with it….There
is no lasting happiness outside the prescribed cycle of painful exhaustion and
pleasurable regeneration, and whatever throws this cycle out of balance –
poverty and misery where exhaustion is followed by wretchedness instead of
regeneration, or great riches and an entirely effortless life where boredom
takes the place of exhaustion and where the mills of necessity, of consumption
and digestion, grind an impotent human body mercilessly and barrenly to death –
ruins the elemental happiness that comes from being alive."
Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition
Posts
