I Don’t Want to be Happy

In fact, I’m surrendering my “inalienable right” to pursue happiness.

For all his supposed enlightenment, Thomas Jefferson really screwed us over with this one.

He probably was chasing Sally, his slave and lover, across the gardens at Monticello that day, got all hot and giddy, ran back to his desk, and deleted the word “property” — in the original formula of “life, liberty and property” of the Declaration of Independence — replacing it with “the pursuit of happiness”.

I imagine that in his fevered state of mind, he also ignored the pre-revolutionary aspiration for public happiness, opting instead for the self-centered, private kind.

I don’t consider it a stretch to link Jefferson’s ambiguous Pied Piper dictum to stock market crashes (everyone has a right to be rich), the housing crisis of 2008 (everyone should own a home whether they can afford it or not), and to the soaring costs of higher education and looming student loan debacle (everyone should go to college).

Birds fly because they have wings, not because they have a right to fly. There are no such things as “rights” in biology, wrote Yuval Harari in ‘Sapiens’. “There are only organs, abilities, and characteristics.”

I can no more fly, than play in the NBA (I’m 5’6” and can’t pivot or run fast enough). However, I…