"Other cultures labor, but what other nation enjoins each separate citizen to tackle happiness as a solo endeavor, a mission, this crazy paradox of a hunt for something that cannot, after all, be earned, but can only be bestowed from the mysterious recesses of life? Give it up. Waste the day, building up solidarity. Empathy is bred of aimlessness, just gazing, of having no agenda, and in a sense no self. The no self is the real self. Something like that.

"That's what that model lounger Walt Whitman did, the un-Ben Franklin American. I loaf and invite my soul. I learn and loaf at my ease, observing a spear of summer grass. In this way he came to his great conception of national citizenship for Americans -– the dear love of comrades.

"It's no coincidence that our most American poet hands out this contrary notion – to loaf – in the midst of what he called in his westward-ho century America's 'Democratic Vistas.' Not much said about American vistas these days. Instead, plans for a wall on our southern border. And individualism? Does it lead to individual happiness or is its tragic destiny autocracy when it is claimed by a strongman?

"The next generation, we're told, will not have the upwardly mobile lives we have had (or thought we were having). For starters, just look at their college debt. Ask the server in the hip farm-to-table restaurant who is reciting the evening specials from memory what the subject of his dissertation is, the Ph.D. he finished four years ago.

"Loafing and inviting your soul is not a prudent business plan, not a life plan, not even a recognizably American project Ben Franklin or Jimmy Gatz would care to . . . pursue. But it begins to look a little like happiness, the kind that comes to claim you, unbidden. Stay put and let the world show up? Or get out there and be a flaneur; wandering along? Which is it? I'm looking out the window. I'm reading Whitman. I'm reading Montaigne. Also, I'm taking the dog for a long walk. She's nosing our way forward."