I've thought that "the pursuit of happiness" is a horrible metric for quite some time. Happiness is too fleeting and often much too shallow a thing to base one's purpose on.
Discussion
Might be the meaning has changed over time.....
Assuredly it has.
But take a gander at this:
https://webstersdictionary1828.com/Dictionary/Happiness
That should be fairly close to the meaning as defined in Jefferson's time, I would think. It is still a fleeting thing and I choose to pursue things with a longer time scale than fleeting happiness.
I've heard it was supposed to be "life, liberty, and property" (John Locke), but "property" was replaced with "the pursuit of happiness. Not necessarily a synonym!
But I haven't read Locke's writings to verify that quote.
If they meant pursuing happiness by acquiring and owning property, it would've been helpful to keep the original wording.
That's correct. IMO it's suspicious, that they changed it.
It's not suspicious. There's a fairly deep debate about it recorded in correspondence with several others about it.
Oh okay, I'll look for that. Any keywords that might help?
Any of the archives of Founding Father correspondence should have a fairly thorough search function at this point. I read about this in books before there was much on the internet . . . So, I can't exactly help direct you at this point. Eventually, this will all be nostr-fied so we could literally do a contextual search or as a local LLM to pull this up natively on nostr, but, that is a future thing.
I'm looking forward to the stage of nostr where we have a lot of stuff uploaded and available. I tried doing that with the Dao de Jing, but I doubt any if it is even still kept by the relays. I was starting to run a relay and learn how to do all that, and then my start9 thingy crapped out, and I havent picked it back up yet.
You can do that on #Alexandria. That is, after all, what the Library of The Future is, in fact, all about. Granted, uploading publications is still a work in progress, but nostr:npub1l5sga6xg72phsz5422ykujprejwud075ggrr3z2hwyrfgr7eylqstegx9z can certainly give you pointers on how to do it. I am still hacking my way through too many basics to get to that point yet.
Upload to our public document relay wss://thecitadel.gitcitadel.eu
That is correct. Early drafts were exactly that. I wish he'd kept that.