Dividends of Happiness
I can never decide whether I love or hate cars. Well, actually, I’m sure I neither love nor hate them, but I can’t tell which pole I gravitate towards.
Cars promise a lot, but reality impinges greatly on my ability to realize said promise. Driving is fun — dealing with traffic is not. Working on cars is enjoyable — circumventing the endless variety of things that inevitably go wrong is odious.
Today I had to change the battery in my girlfriend’s car. This simple operation was complicated by the fact that the positive cable terminal was fastened by a bolt that was almost completely inaccessible — perhaps the most frustrating obstacle you can face in car repair. While this was very far from the worst car repair job I’ve ever been tasked with (I will never again, for instance, replace a heater core), it was exemplary in its simple frustration.
In spite of the aggravation, the completed job is satisfying. At the price of a little frustration, my girlfriend won’t have to suffer the shuttles back and forth to the University, and that’s rewarding. Which is the basic template for most of the worthwhile stuff of life. Instant pleasure is as cheap as it is ephemeral — lasting satisfaction takes a bit of work.
Perhaps that’s the difference between satisfaction and pleasure. Satisfaction lies in a job well done, whereas pleasure lies in, say, eating ice cream. The former can make you happy after it’s over, whereas the latter stops making you happy as soon as its gone. If you fix your car, you’re going to be happy with the result for a long time. But if you get high, you’re going to need to get high again if you want to be happy again — hence drug addicts, who are, ironically, usually not terribly happy (and rather short lived).
This would explain why parents can claim to love their kids, wanting only for them to be happy, yet restrict their intake of ice cream and marijuana, and encourage them to get jobs. They want their kids to be happy not only today, but tomorrow as well — and they want them to have a lot of tomorrows. They are making an investment that they hope will yield dividends of happiness.
Oh Lord, thou givest us everything at the price of an effort.
Leonardo Da Vinci
