An Experiment That Will Change Your Life #033

Your Daily Happiness Gym

Hello and welcome back to Every Dawn. I have been thinking about what I can do in the coming weeks to give this daily video a little bit of structure, so that it is not only random ideas that I have or random quotes, but that it helps you go on a journey with me where we try to explore something together. I remember that a few years ago I had a project, which back then was a blogging project. It was on my daily philosophy blog. You can still find it there if you go to dailyphilosophy.substack.com.

In this blogging project, which went over a whole year back then, I examined six different philosophies of happiness: Aristotle's philosophy of happiness or virtue ethics, what is called virtue ethics, Epicureanism, Stoicism, the hermit life, gratefulness, and Christian justifications for happiness.

These six philosophies of happiness, I tried to apply them to my everyday life. So, I observed my own life and I said I would do every day, apply one of these philosophies of happiness to my own life. And I did it also at university. I did it as a project with students where students would do it, of course, not for a whole year; they would do it for a week that they took one of these philosophies and tried to apply it to their everyday life throughout the week.

Every time I did this for myself or when the students did it, we found that it was a great project and it was a lot of fun, and it gave them something to think about because philosophy, is best when it's not only theoretical, when it's not some, you know, old fart speaking, but when it is really something that you can apply in your life and when you can, really make use of it.

And so, this is something I would like to do. I think in this series of posts now that I have this daily video blog, I thought I could revive this and do it again from the beginning and go through these different philosophies of happiness and try to see if they still work today. And this will not necessarily last a whole year, because back then it was a weekly blog, now it's daily, so even you know for this reason it will be much shorter, but I will also not do it religiously.

We can also from time to time change, and you can still tell me in the comments if you would like something particular from me to talk about something. But to give this whole thing a structure, I would try to do it for the coming few weeks so that we begin, I would say, with Aristotle like I did last time because this is the easiest to get into and the easiest to apply to today's world. Aristotle is very much still, although nobody speaks of him, everybody speaks of the Stoics, but Aristotle still is very easy to apply, very clear to apply to everyday life.

And so I would start with this, and for a few days, you know, perhaps for a few weeks, we will see every day try to find something that in my life reminds me of this theory of Aristotle and where I can apply this theory. And from there we will then go to other theories of happiness and try to see which works best, which actually makes us happier. And I would like to do this with you together. We have this platform here which is not supposed to be a one-way platform, right? It's not only me talking. I will try to do this experiment for myself, but I would find it great if you would accompany me. So, I will explain every day a little bit about the theory, and then perhaps we can try to apply it together and you can write me your experiences in the comments and we can discuss them there, and we can see what we have both learned from this. It's not only me who is supposed to, I have done this already once, so, but I still think that I can learn a lot from doing it again more consciously and even with this daily form of video it will be much more intense this time. But particularly I would be interested in your experiences and whether you think that this is something useful for you.

So please comment and tell me your opinions, and, um, tomorrow I will start with something I've been starting already, making lists and of topics and drawing up some of the theory, but, um, I don't want to make these videos in advance because this would be kind of cheating. I want to make them on the day when I have a particular experience and then I think about this experience with the help of the theory, and then we try to see where this leads us.

So be my guests, be invited to follow me on this if you like, and come along with this experiment. It will not take long, it will take a few minutes every day like it used to here at EveryDawn, every day. It will be only a few minutes and throughout your day you can observe your life and then perhaps you will find the one moment, the other moment where some of these theories apply, where something clicks, where you say, "Oh, this is it, what this philosopher was talking about." And that's all that's needed. There is no, um, there is, uh, no reason to spend a lot of time with this, it's just recognizing that you know these theories have something to tell us and um, they can be useful in understanding our own life and also in making it better.

Thank you and see you tomorrow for the first installment of this. Bye-bye.