Can You Be Happy Alone? #041
Your Daily Happiness Gym
Hello and welcome again to Every Dawn. We talk about Aristotle and how we can use Aristotle's thoughts to improve our lives today. If you're new here, perhaps you want to go back and listen to some of the previous episodes.
Aristotle has this idea that we need to practice our virtues. We need to have more and more of them, and we get more by practicing. They are just like skills, like playing the piano. When we have these virtues, when we practice them, we improve the lives not only of ourselves but also of other people. My benefit and the benefit of others go hand in hand.
Aristotle has a word for this, and he calls this eudaimonia. Now again, don't be scared of the word. It's not important. You could use any other word if you like. In English, sometimes the word "flourishing" is used. Flourishing is what a plant does when it is happy and healthy and successful as a plant.
So, for example, you can have a tree that is unhappy, that's not flourishing. Perhaps it's dried out, it doesn't have enough water, it doesn't have enough sunlight, it doesn't have enough fertilizer, so it just has a few branches sticking out, and it doesn't do anything interesting. But then you can have a tree that's flourishing. This would be a tree that has strong roots, a strong stem, and it has lots of branches and lots of leaves, and perhaps flowers and fruit, and so on. Then we would say the tree is flourishing.
And for Aristotle, human life is just like that. So the goal of human life is to be a flourishing life, not to be a life that's dried up, sitting in the corner, you know, and sorry for itself, but to be a life that's happy and that's full of activity and that produces good results for everyone.
Because if you think about this concept of eudaimonia or flourishing— I would say flourishing from now; there's no need to bother you with the Greek word, but I just wanted to mention it in case you read it somewhere—when we talk about flourishing, the point is again that it's not a zero-sum game. I talked about it last time, but flourishing does not happen at the cost of others. When you are flourishing in your life, you are not necessarily taking this away from somebody else.
(Here is yesterday’s video, in case you missed it:)
This is something that we often get wrong in our societies because very often, our societies are based on competition where, for example, in a job, there can be only one manager, and many employees that have to do what the manager wants, and every one of these employees wants to be the manager, but only one can be it. And so when one becomes the manager, then all the others lose the opportunity to be the manager. And so, in this sense, this is a zero-sum game because there's only one manager. So if one becomes the manager, everybody else loses the manager role.
But often in life, it's not like this. We are often, you know, by these systems that we have in schools, where we have grades, and in jobs where we have promotions that are limited, we are often taught, or we are trained to perceive the world as this field of competition. But this is not the case.
And for Aristotle, this is very clearly not the case because Aristotle says that every single person can only flourish if everything else is flourishing. And we can make sense of it, for example, when we think about that tree I mentioned before. So a tree that is flourishing is not taking something away from its environment and reducing the flourishing of the environment. It's the opposite. When a tree flourishes, then it has lots of leaves, it has lots of life in it, it has lots of insects that go and fly to the flowers, and then it has lots of birds that will, you know, eat these insects or build their nests in its branches. Then it gives a lot of shade, and so humans will go and sit under it because they want the shade. It will draw water from the underground and evaporate it and make the climate around it better. It will cool down the climate. So it will have all this; it will produce a lot of fruit, for example. Also, it has lots of these beneficial qualities.
A flourishing tree is not only for itself a better tree; it's a better tree for the whole environment in which it is. And the whole environment can only flourish if the tree flourishes.
Let's say you have, you know, a little landscape with a lake and a tree and, you know, a few animals, and if the tree is sick, if the tree is a dying tree, then this whole landscape suffers. There is no fruit, there is no shade, there are no places for the birds to nest, and so on, right? There is no food for the insects.
If the tree flourishes, everybody lives better. And the same is true of every single component. If the insects don't flourish, then they cannot contribute to the trees fertilizing the flowers, and so on. If the mammals don't flourish, that will eat the fruit and distribute the seeds, then the seeds don't get distributed. So all these things go together, right? One element, every single element of this little setup with the tree and the lake and the animals, contributes essentially to the flourishing of everything else.
And so this is what Aristotle wants us to understand: Our flourishing is dependent on each other, and we cannot flourish alone. And this is why he says by being virtuous and being good, you're not only benefiting yourself, you're benefiting the whole world around you because all these other people, and even the nature around you, everything flourishes only when you flourish, and you can flourish only if everything else flourishes.
And therefore, it's actually stupid to be an egoist, to try to get everything for yourself and make everybody else, you know, suffer or take away resources from them. In this way, you're not going to flourish because, at some point, you will need these other people to help you flourish. You cannot flourish alone. Flourishing is not an egoist pursuit. It is something that requires us to share our benefits with others in order to get the benefits that they can give to us.
So today, when we think about our lives, let's go and see; let's just go and observe a little more where our lives are connected with the lives of others, where is our flourishing connected with the flourishing of others. Is there a way how I can perhaps improve my own flourishing by improving the life of somebody else? Is there some act of kindness that I can do? Is there some virtue that I can exercise that will make somebody else's life better? But then in return, I will benefit from that for my own life.
I think if you look around, it you will see lots of such opportunities where you can improve your environment in some way; you can improve your world, and this will, in return, help you improve your own life.
So thank you, and see you again tomorrow.
If you missed some of the past episodes, the section on Aristotle begins right here: