The materialistic view of happiness of our age starkly revealed in our understanding of the word "luxury.
Insofar as we appreciate order, it is when we perceive it as being accompanied by complexity, when we feel that a variety of elements has been brought to order--that windows, doors and other details have been knitted into a scheme that manages to be at once regular and intricate. (p184)
The Architecture of Happiness
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Insofar as we appreciate order, it is when we perceive it as being accompanied by complexity, when we feel that a variety of elements has been brought to order--that windows, doors and other details have been knitted into a scheme that manages to be at once regular and intricate. (p184)
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However powerful our technology and complex our corporations, the most remarkable feature of the modern working world may in the end be internal, consisting in an aspect of our mentalities: in the widely held belief that our work should make us happy. All societies have had work at their centre; ours is the first to suggest that it could be something more than a punishment or a penance. Ours is the first to imply that we should seek to work even in the absence of a financial imperative.
If you are doing things in order to be happy...you're doing them in the wrong order.
As time moves on the line will blur. It will no longer seem to be the simplicity of good versus evil, but good versus fools who think they are good.
This is why there is something awful about human freedom. This power to make a choice which will never cease to reverberate.
This was what we did as a species, after all: we built ingenious devices, and we destroyed things.