Life & Wisdom Quote by David Starr Jordan

Misery, Jordan suggests, is not just something that happens to you; it is something you collaborate with. The sting of the line comes from its moral pivot: suffering is common, but a particular kind of bleakness is earned. By tying “really miserable” to an active verb - “tried” - he recasts despair as an outcome of self-sabotage, the slow project of bargaining life down to something smaller than it is.

“Cheapen” is the tell. It’s economic language smuggled into ethics, implying a person can treat existence like a commodity: cut corners, chase shortcuts, trade depth for ease, swap meaning for distraction. The subtext is anti-cynical and faintly accusatory: if you’ve convinced yourself nothing matters, you may be protecting yourself from the harder labor of caring, committing, risking embarrassment, and taking responsibility. Jordan isn’t denying tragedy; he’s isolating a deeper misery that blooms when you reduce your days to price tags and petty grievances.

Context matters. Jordan, a prominent late-19th/early-20th century American educator and public intellectual, wrote in an era intoxicated by “progress” and anxious about its costs. His worldview leaned toward uplift and self-cultivation (and, in his case, the period’s troubling faith in “improvement” narratives). Read with that in mind, the quote functions as both warning and provocation: life can be brutal, but the most corrosive despair comes when you participate in making it mean less, then blame the world for the discount.