I hear you doing it again — measuring yourself against some imagined standard of origin, of background, of the circumstances you were handed at the start. Telling me, and probably yourself, that the deck was stacked. That nature and luck between them left you at a disadvantage you can never quite close.
I want to push back on this directly, because I think you know it isn't true, and I think you use it sometimes as a reason not to try as hard as you could.
Trace any lineage back far enough and the distinctions dissolve. Every king descends from slaves. Every slave has kings somewhere in the line. The family trees we're proud of and the ones we're ashamed of are both just time doing what time does — shuffling the deck, turning things upside down, making illustrious what was once obscure and obscure what was once illustrious. A room full of impressive ancestors doesn't make you noble. It just means your family has been around for a while.
No past life has been lived to lend us glory. The soul alone renders us noble — and it may rise from any condition whatsoever.
Socrates had no pedigree. Cleanthes was a labourer who watered gardens for hire. Philosophy didn't find Plato already great — it made him so. These are your real ancestors, if you choose them. And the only membership requirement is how you conduct yourself.
Here is the sharper point, though — the one underneath the question of origin. You say you want the happy life. So does everyone. The mistake almost everyone makes is confusing the things that are supposed to produce happiness with happiness itself. We gather and accumulate and position and protect, believing that at some point the conditions will be right and the happiness will arrive. It never does, because that's not how it works.
The faster you run through a maze, the more entangled you become. Happiness is not at the end of the accumulation. It never was.
The happy life is freedom from anxiety. And anxiety is precisely what the pursuit of its supposed preconditions generates. The more you grasp, the more you have to defend. The more you have to defend, the less peace you have. You've watched this in other people. You know it's true.
So stop. Not everything — just the grasping. Stop apologising for your origins and stop chasing the things that were never going to deliver what you hoped. You already have access to the only thing that matters. You always did. It was never behind a door that required the right background to open.
Yours, unimpressed by pedigree,