I opened, on the Web, a copy of Benjamin Franklin’s Poor Richard’s Almanac to begin my journey of discovering wisdom old and, if possible, adding wisdom new to it. Now, wisdom by definition must be old and time-honored, so today what you have is repackaged wisdom, whereby the hucksters doling it out for the big bucks (Anthony Robbins et al.) are merely disguising it with modern jargon and marketing magic. That being said, how does ol’ Ben open his Almanac.
Several different versions exist, as Franklin kept rewriting (and reselling) Poor Richard’s observations, so the one I stumbled on was the 1758 edition, showing that Franklin was well known and successful even twenty-plus years before our nation’s birth.
His musings begin with a discussion of trying times and high taxes, wherein a wise old man, doubtlessly Franklin’s mouthpiece, notes that taxes are indeed bad, but that idleness taxes a person twice as much, pride three times as much, and folly four times as much. Amen. When I look back over my long period of unemployment (still unabated), I think I spent a least a majority if not most of my time caught up in those traps.
After some more ramblings and musings, Franklin makes the interesting observation that: “He that lives upon Hope will die fasting. There are no Gains, without Pains.â€
Now, my being a writer, I can criticize the grammar here fairly severely, but we all get the point. However, in this modern-day, shallow, materialistic world of ours, “no gain without pain†now refers almost exclusively to building one’s abs and other bodily parts in the very pursuit of idleness (showing off at Starbucks), pride (bragging about how much one can bench press) and folly (impressing the babes with our flesh). So today, when times are bad—either individually or collectively—it’s much simple to play the blame and litigation game.
My modern interpretation: Franklin is still right, but today you’d better pass it by your lawyer or agent before acting on it. It kind of runs counter to modern times. Instead, for today it should say: “He who lives upon hype will thrive and survive, and there are truly no gains without other people’s pains.
Ouch! Herein lies the perverse and symbiotic relationship between work and entertainment. At work, you get screwed over and pained endlessly by the ambitious, greedy minority, so by the time you get home, you need TV, sports, movies, whatever, to recover from it all. Now you know why, in the absence of the boob tube and sporting events and stupid comedians, our founders turned to hard work and religion. Besides, they didn’t want to be branded with an “A†for fooling around. Sober and straight ruled. Put in that light, I’m not sure which is better.
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