Slow Havamal: 79

[kylec]

In the 79th verse, we hear that the fool who happens to find money or love won’t get any smarter from it, but rather will become arrogant, with a deluded notion of his own worth.

It is best that the unwise man doesn’t get more than he earns. Should he happen to come into some money, or receive the love of a desirable woman, he’ll fail to appreciate what it usually requires to achieve those rewards. Lottery winners soon go broke because it was their frivolity that got them the money in the first place. Professional athletes squander fortunes because they were able to work hard at developing athletic talent, but had no experience in managing a budget or conducting business.

Some people are born very beautiful, and have no trouble gaining suitors. But beauty, unlike other virtues, is rarely earned, and a lover will soon realize that their partner’s attraction is skin-deep. Real love is won through acts of character, displays of bravery, kindness, generosity. There’s little to love about a handsome narcissist, especially if he’s short on cash.

When we enjoy fruits we didn’t cultivate, we don’t learn the lessons concerning what it takes to achieve things. Rather, we have the tendency to become arrogant. We think we must deserve everything we have. “Easy come, easy go,” is a cliché, but the reason the boons of luck leave us is that we haven’t developed the skillset required to maintain or recapture them. In other words, the longer it takes to make your fortune, the longer you’ll enjoy it. This can probably be applied to the recent verses on reputation: if we luck into an inflated reputation because of some viral fame, it isn’t likely to persist, whereas if we built it brick by brick on worthy deeds, it will stand long after we die.

When others lack what we have, we may be tempted to think them lacking in some intrinsic worth. In truth, the world is not a vending machine. It doesn’t dispense precise favors according to an exact input. Sometimes, the chips get stuck, or someone accidentally gets two bags for the price of one. Sometimes, the power goes out, or the machine malfunctions altogether. We think of rewards as paired with simple actions because that’s how we train children and dogs to develop certain habits that as mature individuals, they will do because it feels right, not for a treat.

We talk a lot about justice and fairness, but we have to remember these are human notions imposed upon a more complex reality. The vending machine, our lives, everything we want to operate with mechanical precision, exists in a broader context of nature. There are things we can’t control and things we don’t understand that factor in. When we like the outcome, we call it good luck. What we mean is that we can’t fathom the complex relationships of events that led to this—there is no apparent causality.

In fact, there is. Nature is exactingly fair, we just failed to see how our choices years ago, the confluence of individuals, the weather, the stars, the topography, and a thousand other things interacted to bring about these circumstances. But nature also operates according to laws that, while we may not understand them completely, we can suss out with practice. So there are tried and true ways to earn money, or love. We tend to have to put aside immediate reward, possibly even endure pain, to bring those fates about. They’re there for the taking, as long as the wise man is willing to pay the price.

Perhaps the greater the blessing, the less of a miracle it seems. We know what we did to get there, and the gift doesn’t inflate our egos. If anything, the process humbles us. It is among those things we most believe that we deserve that we’re likely to find the fruits of foolish luck. Meanwhile, our best rewards come at the end of long habits that we built for years after the treats stopped flowing. Where we are wise, we act for the long good, and the good of the act itself. Early luck is a curse that reinforces bad behavior. The fool believes he paid for what he got. The wise knows he got what he paid for.