What if unhappiness was the most essential rudiment of human character? What if there could be no person of consequence for whom unhappiness does not abide at their essence? What kind of spin would that put on the Declaration of Independence’s “pursuit of happiness“?

We Americans are supposed to be free to pursue happiness. Is the Declaration implying that we’re at root unhappy and that the government should foster our effort to achieve the opposite? Jefferson’s likely source, Locke, puts it this way: “...the highest perfection of intellectual nature lies in a careful and constant pursuit of true and solid happiness.” “True and solid happiness“ has a stoical ring to it; the sort of happiness impervious to vicissitudes. A condition earned by way of “a careful and constant pursuit,“ a deeply philosophical, hard-earned positioning of the self vis-a-vis the shit that we encounter day in day out, directly or less directly.

But I don’t want to consider that kind of happiness. It’s too rarefied. I want to get at the want at the base of every endeavor; the uniformly simple want at the base of all action regardless of the enterprise that is its catalyst. The entrepreneur seeks out the deal, does what needs to be done to make it, consumes or reinvests the profit and goes back for more because the want dictates it thus. The artist writes the play, paints the picture, produces the song, because the want drives him on. We don’t think about it much because there’s little profit in that. It’s the want that makes us seek happiness, because the very condition of being in want renders us unhappy.