A man spends his life chasing things. Money, maybe. Or power. Or fame. It depends on the man, but the chasing is always there. He runs after something because he thinks he must, because everyone else is running too, and because stopping feels like failure.
But there comes a day when he catches what he was chasing, and he sees it for what it is. A pile of money that does not love him back. A title that does not make his food taste better. Applause that fades the moment the hands stop clapping. He thought the chase would make him happy. Instead, he feels a quiet, nagging emptiness.
The wise ones figure it out before it’s too late. A life worth living is not about what you take but what you give. A man who serves—who feeds the hungry, who fixes what is broken, who gives his time to something other than himself—he is the one who sleeps well at night.
This is because service does something to a person. It pulls him out of his own head, where all the worst troubles live. The mind is a noisy place, full of worries about things that may never happen. But work—real, tangible work that helps another human being—has a way of quieting all that nonsense. A man cannot be both useful and miserable at the same time.
Of course, people don’t like to hear this. They are too busy chasing. They believe happiness is a thing to be acquired, like a fine coat or a fast horse. They do not see that happiness is what sneaks up on you while you are carrying a sack of flour to someone who has no bread. It is not something you can own. It is something you feel when you forget about yourself long enough to be of use to someone else.
The best men have known this for a long time. The old sailors who helped a shipmate before helping themselves. The farmers who shared seed with a neighbor when the crop was bad. The grandmothers who cooked for the whole street because it was the right thing to do. They did not write books about happiness, and they did not speak much about it either. They simply lived in a way that made sense, and in doing so, they found the thing everyone else was looking for.
A man can live for himself and find nothing but hunger. Or he can live for others and find that, somehow, it was himself he was saving all along.
And that, in the end, is the whole trick.
Join us in making the world a better place – you’ll be glad that you did. Cheers friends.