In the Puritan morality that I remember, it was tacitly assumed that if one
was thrifty, enterprising, intelligent, practical and prudent in not violating
social conventions, one ought to have a happy and "successful" life. Failure
was due to some weakness or perversity peculiar to the individual; but the
decent man need have no nightmares. It is now rather more common to assume
that all individual misery is the fault of "society," and is remediable by
alterations from without. Fundamentally the two philosophies, however different
they may appear in operation, are the same. It seems to me that all of us,
so far as we attach ourselves to created objects and surrender our wills
to temporal ends, are eaten by the same worm.
-- T.S. Eliot. "Introduction" to Nightwood by
Djuna Barnes, (1937).