Nature condemns us to shop until we drop. According to Hobbes, there is no “repose of a mind satisfied” and “felicity is a continual progress of the desire from one object to another, the attaining of the former, being still but the way to the latter.” Human beings are inclined to a perpetual, restless desire for power after power that ends only with death. Locke is no cheerier. He tells us that human desire always looks beyond present enjoyments to an absent good, and the minute we find ourselves contented by something, a new “uneasiness” disturbs us and “we are set afresh on work in the pursuit of happiness.” By this argument, the pursuit of happiness means that happiness as such is the Holy Grail.

Is our curse the endless pursuit of a happiness which can never be attained? (This article is full of interesting observations from brilliant men, but it is also peppered with this distracting libertarian partisanship that does not hold up to the wine, if you will.)

Benjamin Franklin on American Happiness by Jerry Weinberger, City Journal 21 September 2010