Jeremy slowly bit down on his bologna sandwich, frowning slightly at the mayonnaise that squirted out onto his jeans. As he took another bite his thoughts began to turn to the thought of having to go to work again the next day.
“Great,” he thought to himself. “I’ve been home fifteen minutes and I’m already dreading going back.”
The truth was that Jeremy hated work. He hated everything about it. He hated the beat-down and paled blue carpet of his office, he hated his uncomfortably hard chair, and most of all, he hated the people. But today, as things would have it, was the day when all that was about to change. A television ad for an anti-depressant medication was scattering various colors of light across the room when the thought came to him. Jeremy licked the mayonnaise off of his fingers and slid into the chair in front of his computer.
Now when he typed the word “happy” into the search engine, Jeremy expected to see some doctor’s website trying to sell a book. But what he came across caught him completely off-guard.
He was staring the words “Ansen Lays It On” in the face, and soon found himself reading blog entries from some lunatic teenager with too much time on his hands. Finally, however, he clicked on one titled “Aristotle’s Definition of Happiness and it’s Implications on YOU!”.
“Odd…” Jeremy mumbled quietly.
“Aristotle said that ‘the good of man (and, by extension, the definition of happiness) is the active exercise of his soul’s faculties in conformity with excellence or virtue, or if there be several human excellences or virtues, in conformity with the best and most perfect among them’ (Book One, Section 7)…” the blog was saying. “So pretty much Aristotle was saying that happiness is found in contemplation of the best objects which man has the ability to know.”
Jeremy paused for a moment. Briefly the thought passed through his head that the poor kid writing this had even more time on his hands than he thought. However he was more concerned with what Aristotle was saying. It seemed that perhaps the old Greek had a point, but Jeremy already did a lot of thinking, and he didn’t like the prospect of doing more. He slowly guided the mouse to the sidebar, where he clicked a link titled “Abe’s Blog.”
Eerily enough, he was now looking at an entry titled “Epictetus, Happiness, and Lacrosse”.
“And so I finally decided to base this blog on the sport of lacrosse…”
Jeremy skipped a few lines.
“Epictetus says that ‘When…we return to striving to be our best selves, this is how happiness is won.’ Epictetus was a stoic, and because of this, he thought thus: there are some thing in life you can control, and some you can’t. So don’t worry about the stuff you can’t control, but do your best in the stuff that you can. Then you’ll be happy.”
This sounded slightly more appealing than the Aristotle, but Jeremy wasn’t exactly sold. There seemed to be a lot of bad stuff happening to him that he couldn’t control, and he had no idea how he could be happy with just taking all that stuff and disregarding it.
At this point Jeremy was sinking into a depression about his inability to find a good definition of happiness, but he figured he’d give it one more try. He clicked on a link that said “Nathan” and saw a blog that only had two entries. The first was an intro to the blog, and the second…
“Aquinas said that ultimate happiness ‘consists in the vision of the divine essence [and] does not depend upon the body’. Aquinas agreed with Aristotle that the contemplative life helped lead to happiness, and he probably also agreed with Epictetus that you should do the best you can in all you do. But Aquinas was able to add one thing to Aristotle and Epictetus’ definitions that made them complete: God.”
Jeremy straightened up in his chair and read the last sentence again. As he did so a faint smile came across his lips.
Jeremy was still smiling as he returned to the search engine and typed in the next subject that he needed help with. And to his pleasant surprise, yet another blog by these crazy kids was before him.
And so, Jeremy stayed up till early the next morning reading up on Ansen, Abe, David, and Matthew’s relationship advice…
Ansen, sorry to report this but ur blog is becoming slightly boring. We don’t care about jeremy. U need to learn to “post w/ a purpose” like us!
love,
R.A.K.E.
I feel like I’m sitting on my desert Island looking through a telescope and, what do I see? Ansen in a raft, rowing towards me with firm dilligence. “Look,” I say to Matt in a cracked voice from thirst, “We’ve got company.”