Living A Happy Life

Article #3: Living A Happy Life by F. Alexander Magoun

Not every gifted adolescent grows into an emotionally-mature adult with a valid sense of who he is, or of his ability to live a happy productive life. Some wilt under an emotional blight which has nothing to do with economic status, Social position, or education.

The wise youngster, with an eye on the long future, thoughtfully examines his aptitudes and his potentialities. He neither overestimates nor underestimates them. The one will lead to bitter disillusionment, the other to tragic; waste. As Frederick Karl says, each of us is born with a package, and we must discover with insight and clarity what the package contains before we can use its contents effectively.

Most young people expect either too much or too little in this world. To make it worse, they expect it too soon. We need time and patience to find ourselves and to reach our expectations achievement can be less at thirty-five than was hoped for and more at sixty than was anticipated.

In the rootless conditions of our industrial civilization it is often difficult for a young person to
determine where he is headed. He looks forward to success in business and love, but with no real criteria save the questionable ones of money, romance, authority (approached from the point of view of power instead of responsibility), prestige, and security. He has little realization of how life gets interfered with by the flux of fortune, unexpected death, economic upset, competition, loss of job, or the sudden duty to assume the obligations of a formidable task. The young people of today, seek what Harold Lasswell describes as “security, income, and deference.” Fewer of them are looking for what my generation called opportunity. Nevertheless, like us, what they want more than anything else is happiness.

Youth has such obvious assets as vigor, curiosity, enthusiasm, anticipation, light heartedness, romance. There are also grave disadvantages, such as having to decide what to do for a living or whom to marry, without possessing the background wisdom of long experience.

The future is by no means entirely in our own hands. What we do about it is. To be able to stand up under adversity is largely to be able to keep our perspective, our courage, our faith in the future as worth living.