Eudaimonic reading matter? Photo ©Radical Rag Dolls’ Factory
The Western World seems to be getting morose and steadily more crotchety in its desperate pursuit of happiness. Self-improvement and happiness are the eternal topics du jour. A quick Google search reveals: no lifestyle magazine, or even (usually well-respected) mainstream newspaper without its own:”How To Be Happy in Three (or Five, or Ten) Easy Steps”.
Clearly, we’ve lost our way.
What is happiness? What are the sources of happiness? According to the deafening marketing machine roaring in our ears, life satisfaction mostly consists of physical pleasure and luxury—things to possess— as per the much hated Goop (But why the hatred, anyway? Isn't Goop just a breezily over-the-top version of the regular capitalist idea of happiness?)
Lifestyle magazines add a handful of yoga-cum-spirituality gizmos to their Me-style kind of happiness. They dish out Life Lessons concentrating on the fit, successful, rich and accomplished you, detailing the exact time to get up in the morning (half an hour earlier!) and which yoga poses to strike to make you a truly successful and happy human being (Darling, I think I’ll have a Downward Facing Dog today.) Into this unholy concoction, stir in some smithereens of concern for your fellow woman—something along the lines of “10. Do something every day for others, it will make you feel better”—and voilà: happy you are.
Happiness for sale? The glittery shallowness is appalling. Happiness through narcissism? The self-centredness of it all is nauseating. And clearly these recipes don’t work: these selfsame feel-happy-articles keep clogging our news feeds on a daily basis.
No wonder there is a general sense of dissatisfaction, a wave of rage going through our societies.
It begs the question: Is happiness even possible in a consumerist world?
What is missing in this bullet-listed picture, seemingly made up of tatters and shreds of some true concept of happiness? Why are we, citizens of the richest countries in the world, so unhappy? **What do we really need for our Excellent Life?
What is missing is the bigger picture. What is missing is meaningfulness, and concepts like fairness, solidarity, empathy, concern for others. What is missing is a philosophical framework and an ethical vision.
Eudaimonia is more than just happiness. To live a eudaimonic life, you have to take responsibility—not only for yourself, and not only for your own clan, but for your widest community as well. Human life cannot flourish in an ethically toxic environment. Maybe you feel great being the sharpest shark in the pond—triumphant in pulling off successful (even if shady and often malodorous) deals, encouraged by capitalist notions of “the greatest good”.
Pinching your nose and avoiding to feel the hate and misery you caused to other people, are you truly happy?
Think about it. Are you happy when people around you are miserable? Moreover, how do you feel when it is you who caused their misery?
Can you happily step over the homeless person sleeping in the entrance to your bank? Or has your bank installed spikes, so you are spared the uncomfortable sight?
Are you telling yourself that you are not responsible—_are you your brother’s keeper?_Or do you just outrightly blame the poor, the homeless, the war refugees, the ill and the maladapted themselves for their situation?
Does that make you happy?
Stepping off my soapbox, slightly out of breath, I’ll say this: the great majority of people are not psychopaths—most of us have a pretty accurate sense of fairness and justness, virtue and meaning.
Truth is, life has become pretty overwhelming in the last hundred or so years. Where it is just possible to imagine nineteenth-century Victorians in rural England living in blissful unawareness of the crimes their Empire was committing, for us, in the globalised twenty-first century, it is impossible to claim ignorance. The misery of the world unfolds in front of our eyes, 24/7.
It simply seems too much. It’s not that we’re callous. The problems simply seem too overwhelming. We feel frightened and paralysed, and in need of protecting ourselves against the staggering world issues camping out in our backyards.
But to reach Eudaimonia, in the Aristotelean sense, your inner as well as your public life—the circumstances in your community—need a certain degree of harmony and peace and justness —things being right— as well as justice—things being fair. Human beings cannot flourish in a toxic and hostile environment.
Eudaimonia is more than just happiness. To live a eudaimonic life, you have to take responsibility—not only for yourself, and not only for your own clan, but for your community, too. Getting outside yourself and striving for your Excellent Life—instead of a “happy” life—according to your virtues and your values, is what transforms your mere homo sapiens into a mensch. Striving to live a eudaimonic life is truly revolutionary.
Eudaimonia is about a life based on fairness and justness. A life based on ethical values and participation in your community’s organisation and wellbeing—aka politics.
Nor am I saying anything particularly new. In fact, it doesn’t much matter whether you prefer “If anyone has material possessions and sees a brother or sister in need but has no pity on them, how can the love of God be in that person?” (1 John 3:17), or ”The heaviest burdens should rest on the strongest shoulders”—the intention is identical. What has changed, in our globalised twenty-first-century world, is the scale on which are empathy is needed.
Eudaimonia requires empathy as a key concept and a tool for a truly happy and meaningful life, and fairness for all as the benchmark of a successful society. More about this in my next story: Embrace your Empathy!.
Mina advocating eudaimonic rights Photo ©Radical Rag Dolls’ Factory
