Skovoroda said happiness is work that suits your nature. What if your nature suits work nobody pays for?

Hryhorii Skovoroda, the eighteenth-century wanderer, turned down post after post and spent the last decades of his life on the road with a few books. His central idea is srodnist, usually translated "congeniality" or "kinship": each of us is suited by nature to some work, and happiness lies in finding it. One of his fables sets the bee, which works because gathering honey is its nature and finds joy in it, against the hornet, which only takes.

I sell books in Lviv, and I like the idea very much. Many of my friends are trying to live by it now, asking what their nature is suited for rather than what pays.

But here is the trouble. Skovoroda could refuse every post because he was willing to be poor, and he was a single man with no one to feed. The work that suits many people's natures, writing, caring for the old, music, teaching small children, is badly paid or not paid at all. A bee does not have rent.

So is the doctrine only for people who can afford it? Or was Skovoroda's real lesson that congenial work costs something, and that you have to decide what you will give up for it? The epitaph attributed to him reads: "The world tried to catch me, but did not." I am not sure most of us can say that.