Where are the vehicles to character development in secular society?
Each of us owes it to our spouse, our children, our friends, to be as happy as we can be. And if you don’t believe me, ask a child what it’s like to grow up with an unhappy parent, or ask parents what they suffer if they have an unhappy child...
All happy people are grateful, and ungrateful people cannot be happy. Become grateful and you will become a much happier person.
The only happy people I know are people I don’t know well.
Everything worthwhile in life is attained through hard work. Happiness is not an exception.
Most people, like the Israelites, complain far more often than they express gratitude. People frequently register a complaint with a manufacturer or service provider, but they rarely write a note of thanks for a job well done. We would all do well to consider writing a thank you note each time we write a letter of complaint. Similarly, and more importantly, too many people criticize their spouses more often than they compliment them. That is the road to an unhappy marriage.
There are two ways to choke off free expression. We’ve already discussed one of them: clamp down on free speech and declare some topics off-limits. That strategy is straightforward enough. The other, more insidious way to limit free expression is to try to change the very language people use.
As colleges and universities became dominated by the Left, tolerance and diversity fell by the wayside. The rising hostility toward liberal values like free speech has made entire college campuses unsafe places for people who align with the Right.
The majority does not need a special amendment. The only reason you have a First Amendment is to protect the rights of the minorities, of people who aren’t the majority. People who aren’t in power.
In one case, you’re hoping someone else will do the right thing. In the other case, you’re directing your own life, even if someone else does something stupid. Guess which path is going to be more successful.
Without a philosophy of life, we do not know how to react to what life deals us. Our happiness bounces up and down, determined by the day’s events and the immediate emotions they elicit rather than by sober reflection. Without being able to place events into perspective – which comes from having a philosophy of life – we are at the mercy of events. Our ship has no destination and no compass.
The problem in our time is that maturity is not high on the list of goals we offer the next generation. We stress happiness, success, and intelligence but not maturity. And that is too bad, both for society, which suffers when too many of its members are immature, and for the individual who wants to be happy. For happiness is not available to the immature. And one of the prominent characteristics of immaturity is seeing oneself primarily as a victim.
If you want to have everybody agreeing with you, join a club or program or church that agrees with you.
If there’s a violent mob on campus, it isn’t Ben Shapiro’s fault – he’s just someone coming to campus to talk about ideas. Mob violence is the mob’s fault.
But the combination of modern hyper-parenting and left-leaning professors and administrators has allowed students to remake universities into large-scale editions of the island in Lord Of The Flies.
Like Whitney Houston, we believe the children are the future. But adults are in charge of the present, and we should start acting like it.
Humans don’t really like freedom of speech,” Lukianoff told them, “they like to say they like it. And they definitely like their won freedom of speech. They don’t necessarily like your freedom of speech that much.
We determine how much we will allow something to make us unhappy. That we can determine our emotional response to events is hard for many people to acknowledge. Most people think that events make them unhappy, that their happiness level is essentially dictated by what happens to them. But this is untrue.
One cannot be a good person without gratitude, and one cannot be a happy person without gratitude. This provides a vital link between goodness and happiness.
Everyone has been wounded. It is almost inevitable that our parents will wound us in some way. If we are not wounded by our parents, we may be wounded by the death or illness of a parent or sibling, by a bitter marriage or bitter divorce, or if our immediate family is close to idyllic, we might be wounded by some other adult who abuses us or peers who mock us. An unscarred childhood is possible but very rare.
Who is more free? The person that with years of hardship and self-discipline became the best actor in the world, or the person that did nothing but watch actors in movies on TV all those years.