Happiness is Chosen Wisely: 3300 Axioms of Self-Evident Truths
by Oregon author Byer
Book review by Leona Grieve
Most of us spend our lives working and raising a family, with the ultimate plan to retire to a life of happiness and tranquility. The truth is, even when we retire, we may find ourselves not happy, and wondering exactly what prevented us from achieving this goal.
Author Byer felt the same way, but it wasn’t long before he discovered that the true path to happiness was not in acquiring ‘things,’ or ‘desires,’ as he calls them, but in getting closer to nature and developing a simpler life. After burning out of the engineering business world at 37 years, and 60-hour work weeks, Byer bought a sailboat and became a semi self-employed, full-time sail bum for twenty years. A struggling sculptor, he decided to follow his dreams of philosophy and writing for self-discovery that he had been reading and writing about after leaving his professional career.
At the age of 64 years, for his own satisfaction, he wrote for 14 years about happiness, since he couldn’t find any writers who seemed to know what it was. After his career ended he discovered society’s goals of success centered around possession and wealth, that society didn’t know how to become happy or what happiness really is other than just trying to perpetuate its own social structural survival, which is driven by our necessities of a desire for pleasure and fear of pain, by passions and not by reason.
In writing Happiness is Chosen Wisely: 3300 Axioms of Self-Evident Truths, Byer shares his insights on what he believes to be the real source of happiness. And it’s not what we all think. This is not a book that is meant to be read in a short period as the axioms cover all aspects of the human experience: desire and fear, human nature, simplicity, society, truth, wisdom, happiness, enlightenment, and much more. Instead, each axiom is designed to help the reader understand how they can find true happiness, even at an early age. Many of them provide an ‘aha!’ moment, prompting the reader to realize that they may actually be happy now; they just don’t know it yet. Recommended for all ages.
For more information, please visit the author’s website
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