Complicate Your Life! #038

Your Daily Happiness Gym - Today: Aristotle on Overcoming Challenges

Hello and welcome again to Every Dawn, where we are discussing ideas on how to improve our lives—ideas that come from classic philosophy. We have been talking about Aristotle recently, who thinks that in order to live happier lives, we need to be more engaged, and particularly, we need to use our virtues. We need to use our moral virtues. This is something that is very central to Aristotle: the idea that a bad person cannot possibly have a good life, and only if we are morally good, then we have fulfilled the necessary criteria for a good life.

Now, it's not enough to just be morally good, and it's not even clear how to become morally good spontaneously. So Aristotle says that virtues are like skills—it is something that we have to practice to have the right amount of virtue for every situation, or the right mixture of virtues so that we always act in a good way. The word for this that Aristotle uses is "phronesis."

Don't be scared of the word. The word is just the word that we use because our language doesn't have a word for this thing. English doesn't have a word for this thing—the right amount of virtue to have in every particular situation. There is no word for that in English, and so we just use Aristotle's word, which is the Greek word "phronesis." But what it means is exactly that: the ability to know which virtues to employ in what amount so that I can reach a good outcome for everyone, including me, but also including everyone else—the best possible outcome.

And how do we get this ability, this phronesis? We get it through practicing. We make lots of experiences in our lives, and the more we practice, the better we get at it. And so, one thing that I always found a nice visualization of this is the thing with the two farmers.

Imagine that you have two farmers, and they are both beginning farmers. They don't know how to farm, and both have inherited a farm, roughly equal in size and type. One of these two farmers has a handbook, and this handbook will tell him exactly what to do for every single situation that he will encounter on the farm. So, for example, there is somewhere there is a leaf that is brown, and then he looks up in the book, you know, "brown leaf," and he finds out what he has to do in order to deal with this problem. You know, put this kind of chemical compound to the plant, 10 grams, and then this will be okay. And this book contains every possible problem that he may encounter. So just by looking at this book, he can be sure that he can solve all his problems.

The other farmer has again a similar type of farm, but he does not have the book. So when something happens on the farm, when something goes wrong, when a problem arises, the second farmer has to solve it himself. He has to observe what's happening. He has, you know, various tools, and he has a bit of string and, you know, some chemicals, but he doesn't know how they work, and he has no experience. So he has to make all these experiences himself. He has to learn. He has to slowly adapt. He has to—he will kill a few plants, he will, you know, manage to overcome a few problems, and so in time, he will become better and better, gain experience, and become a better farmer. While the other one is from the first moment a perfect farmer because he has this magical book that has all the answers.

But now we can ask: who of these two farmers is more likely to be happy? Assuming they are both in the long run roughly equally successful—because, you know, the one without the book will also learn how to do things after a while—they're equally successful, but who will be happier? And if we think about it, I mean, who would you like to be? Would you like to be the farmer with the book or the farmer without the book?

And I think initially, perhaps some of us will say, "With a book, my life is easier." But imagine how boring it is if you cannot do anything yourself. You always have to obey the book. Whatever the book says, you have to do, and you have no room for experimentation, for learning, for feeling proud about what you're doing. While the other farmer, of course, in the beginning, he has a more difficult life, but eventually, he will be much more satisfied. His life will make sense. He will have learned something. He will have an achievement, you know? He will have—when something survives, then he will be happy. He will say, "Now I learned it. I know how to do that. I feel empowered." Right? While the farmer with a book never feels empowered. He's always a slave of that book.

And I think this says something about Aristotle's theory of happiness and why acquiring this phronesis, acquiring these abilities, is actually a good thing and why it contributes to happiness. Because being able to manage things in our lives—not to have them managed by others, but to be able to manage them ourselves—gives us this sense of deep satisfaction that makes our lives worth living.

Right? You could, in an extreme evaluation, you could say perhaps the life of the farmer who has this book and he's never allowed to do anything but follow the book until the end of his life—perhaps his life is not even worth living. What is he living for? What is he achieving? He achieves nothing. The other farmer achieves a lot. The other farmer has a farm. He is dealing with it. He is making it flourish, and in the end, he can be happy. He can be proud of what he has achieved.

And I think we can take this back perhaps into our lives, this little metaphor or parable of the two farmers. Because our lives are similar in many respects: we have some areas of our lives where we are ourselves active and learning and producing some outcome ourselves, but many other areas of our lives we are happy to give away to some expert who will tell us what we do. This might be, you know, looking up in Wikipedia or getting a recipe from the internet, or perhaps even, you know, if we talk about cooking, not cooking at all but just ordering a meal or ordering one of these meal boxes where I can cook something, but the ingredients are already pre-measured, you know?

And there is this continuum. Now in your own life, let's continue with the meal, right? You have the—on the one side, the person who completely alone has an idea for some meal that they want to eat, and then they try to find out how to cook it, and they experiment, and perhaps they read a little on the internet how to do it. And in the end, they do it, they manage, they finish, they eat the meal, and they have produced something they can be proud of. And on the other hand, you have this person who is just ordering it from a shop. And perhaps in between, you have the person who orders the meal box with the measured ingredients.

So these last two, I would say, they don't get any satisfaction. They have a meal, yes, they eat it, they are not hungry anymore, but it hasn't done anything for them. While the first person who actually discovers how to make this meal, this is a person who now is empowered. He has been creative. He has been doing something. And this is more than the meal. When the meal is finished and when everybody is now not hungry anymore, which is now the case for all three of these example people—they're not hungry anymore—but the first one is much more satisfied than the other two. The second one, perhaps with a meal box, is somewhere in the middle. And the one who ordered from the shop is perhaps, you know, doesn't think at all about the food. He doesn't have any sense of achievement or anything.

And so you can see how being this first person who makes everything themselves can elevate your life. It can make it much better. And this is counterintuitive because our society tries to tell us the more convenient life is, the better. The more you can order, the more free time you will have, the better. But the point is that free time itself, if it's empty, it's just empty time. It's time that we then have to kill by watching TV, for example. It's not free time that actually enriches your life. While the person who cooks their meal, yes, they in a sense they waste this time, but it's not a waste. It's a good use of this time. They use this time in order to produce a value for themselves, in order to produce satisfaction, in order to produce a better life.

And at the end of the day, this first person who makes the meal themselves has spent some time on it, but they have received something. They have received this happiness and the satisfaction of being able to do this. And so for your own life, there are many such things that can give you this sense of accomplishment. It is cooking a meal. It is, for example, making a yogurt. It's very easy to make yogurt. I do it every day, um, instead of buying it in a shop. You can make it yourself. Just look up on the internet how to do it. You can bake your own bread. It's something that is very quick, very easy when you know how to do it. No problem at all. Do some easy cooking.

And then perhaps more complicated things. Learn, for example, how to play a bit of music if you are musical, or learn how to paint something if you feel that you are creative in this way, or read a book, or learn how to perhaps write a book and write down your observations, or take a camera and make some photographs of your environment. All these are ways in which you can express your own creativity, and you can have the sense that you have achieved something rather than just being this passive consumer of all these things that society gives you but that leave you empty, really, and not with any sense of fulfillment.

So tell me in the comments if you have made this experience or if you are currently perhaps doing something like that. I feel that the more things I do manually—even, you know, household things like, you know, cleaning something, wiping a window, you know, cleaning a door, washing dishes—even that manually instead of just putting them in a machine gives me a sense of satisfaction. It gives me the feeling that I have done something today.

And making these videos also, making a video every day, you would think is a kind of burden, but it's not. It's an ongoing, you know, satisfaction. I am doing this, and everyone can do this. You can do it. Grab a camera, do it. Grab your phone, and you will see that this gives your life a new dimension, and it gives you a way to achieve happiness out of nowhere without having to, you know, spend money or do anything. You do the things you would do anyway, but you do them consciously, and you do them actively, and this improves your life.

So tell me what you think, and I'll see you tomorrow. Thank you and goodbye!