Episode
Pursuit, not Happiness
- Podcast
- I Believe
- Published
- May 5, 2026
- Duration seconds
- 1790
- Processing state
not_requested- Canonical source
- https://joelkdouglas.substack.com/p/pursuit-not-happiness
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Summary
The Open Door. October, 1723. Market Street Wharf in Philadelphia. A seventeen-year-old runaway stepped off a boat. Dirty from the journey, pockets stuffed with shirts and stockings. He carried his entire fortune on him, a Dutch dollar and about a shilling in copper. Food money for a few days and nothing else. He could not afford a room. The shilling went to the boatmen for passage down the Delaware. He had run from his older brother’s printing shop in Boston without permission and with no prospects. He knew no one in the city. He walked up Market Street looking for bread. He asked a baker for three pennies’ worth. The baker gave him three great, puffy rolls. He had nowhere to put them. He carried two under his arms and ate the third as he walked. A young woman watched him pass from her father’s doorway and decided he looked ridiculous. He probably did. Years later, after she had become his wife, they would laugh about it. Walking back toward the river, he came upon a woman and her child who had been on the boat with him from Burlington. He gave them the two rolls he had left. He was tired, friendless, nearly broke, and he had just given away two-thirds of his food. He drifted with the Sunday crowd into a Quaker meeting house near the market, sat down in the silence of unprogrammed worship, and fell asleep. When the meeting ended, a stranger gently woke him. He noted decades later in his autobiography that the meeting house was the first building he ever slept in in Philadelphia. The boy was Benjamin Franklin. The first house he slept in in his new city was a church, and the door was open. No guard checked his papers. No barrier to the kind of stranger Franklin was. Exhausted, unwashed, unknown. The door was open because we had not yet chosen to close it. That door is…