“There are only two tragedies in life. One is not getting what you want and the other is getting it.” — Oscar Wilde

According to people who research such things, this oft-repeated aphorism is taken from Wilde’s play Lady Windermere’s Fan: A Play About a Good Woman from this line:

I congratulate you, my dear fellow. In this world there are only two tragedies. One is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it. The last is much the worst, the last is a real tragedy!

If the gossip mags are right, it seems as though the lives of many rich and famous people are marred with marital strife, cultish obsessions, and drugs. Apparently it is possible to be unhappy on a billion-dollar yacht. Go figure. The wealth and freedom to do whatever we desire is not only no guarantee of happiness but sometimes an opening to disaster.

My high school buddies and I would often say “Yeah, but is he really happy?” when we observed a guy with a very striking woman. It was a running inside joke we had based on our ongoing deep philosophical debate about Hugh Hefner — rich and in his pajamas all day surrounded by enthused beautiful women. “Yeah, but is he really happy?” I confess the joke was not borne of moral and aesthetic maturity so much as evidence of an ambivalence that I have almost outgrown.

Wilde himself pursued illicit desires to his detriment. But he possessed a gentle insight into romantic folly and the courage often required to be honest about its consequences. (In the Lady Windermere play, one character offers to destroy her own reputation to save her daughter’s marriage while a gentleman acts nobly to keep her secret.)

As Americans, we strongly believe in granting and protecting a wide zone of personal freedom so each of us can act on our desires, values, and goals. But freedom is not an end in itself. If we are empty, decadent and sensual, if we are Weimar Germany or the entitled classes living solely for the entertainments of the Versailles of Louis XVI, then it cannot end well.

It matters what we want.

Despite many centuries of accumulated written wisdom about the importance of directing thoughts and actions towards the good, we all still manage to seek loopholes to accommodate appetites. Most of us are protected from our baser appetites simply because we can’t afford to pursue them. A life centered on pleasurable distractions, full of coke and lap dances like Hunter Biden? There go I but for divine grace and/or a lack of $80,000 a month for doing nothing.

Wanting that which would not make us happy even if we had it is why Eve and her husband went for that damned apple. Some things don’t change much.