The Misunderstanding That Keeps You Unhappy #034

Happiness Gym: Aristotle and the Virtues

Hello, and welcome to Every Dawn. In this series, which starts today, we want to explore the idea of a happiness gym. This was just an idea I had about how to name this series— the idea that every day, we will talk a little bit about happiness and what we can practically do to improve the happiness in our lives in a way that is not something I make up, but something that is recognized as real philosophy and that has been practiced through the ages. It is a recognized way of improving one's happiness.

Many of these ways are today forgotten because people don't engage with philosophy so much anymore. Instead, we have all these gurus telling us how to become happy by doing one or the other crazy thing, and many of these things are not supported by any research. They are just crazy ideas one person has. But this is not the case here. I'm not going to tell you anything of myself; we are going to explore ways of becoming happier that are well-known ways discussed by the great philosophers.

I would like to start this with Aristotle, just because Aristotle is so straightforward, and he makes so much sense, especially today. Aristotle says, and we will talk about him in the coming sessions, so it's not that these five minutes here are the whole of his theory, but I want to start with this because for Aristotle, it's very important that the virtues are at the center of one's happiness. Aristotle believes that we cannot be happy if we are not virtuous, if we are not good people, if we are not morally good people. Being morally good is necessary for one's happiness.

This is interesting, right? Because today, we generally think that one can be ruthless, one can be lying, one can be even a criminal, one can be cheating others and become happy through the results, through the fruits of this cheating. So we believe that somebody who is dishonest and makes a lot of money by selling a bad product can still be a happy, rich person, or perhaps an influencer on the internet who takes advantage of his followers, who lies to them, who makes up sensationalist claims, and therefore gets lots of views. We think that this person can still be happy being successful in this way, but Aristotle would not agree with this at all.

So, for Aristotle, being happy, being truly happy, and being morally good is the same thing. And we can kind of make sense of it if we ask, let's say we have a criminal, let's say you are a drug dealer, a killer, some sort of criminal, and now we can ask, can you be really happy? And Aristotle would say no, of course. When you do these bad things, you are doing okay, you will earn a lot of money, you will be rich, but then on the other hand, you will also have the police coming after you, you have to hide your activities from the public, you have to even hide them from your family, you will not be able to tell your children what your line of work is, you will always be afraid that you will get caught, you will always be afraid that the other criminal you are competing with will outcompete you, kill you, attack you, take over your business. And you see this in these crime shows, how this is between criminals. If you think of Breaking Bad, all these interactions between these people where you cannot trust anyone and everybody's after you, and this never ends well. Aristotle would say so.

The only way to be truly at peace and to reach true happiness is through being a good person, is through having the virtues. And we will talk more about the virtues later, and how to employ them, and how to use them, but here is first what Aristotle thinks the main virtues are. I will read them to you. He recognizes nine virtues. He says there is wisdom, and obviously, this is the most important because this allows us to understand how to employ all the other virtues: prudence, justice, fortitude, courage, liberality, magnificence, magnanimity, and temperance.

So you don't need to memorize all those. I haven't done it myself. This is not important which particular virtues we have. It's more important to understand the idea of a virtue. The idea of a virtue is some property of your character that benefits yourself and others at the same time. This is very important to Aristotle—that it benefits not only us but also others, but also that it not benefits only others but in return, it also makes our own life better.

So when I'm honest, for example, I benefit the person to whom I am honest, but I also benefit myself because this other person recognizes me as honest, and later they will relate to me in a better way, they will be nice to me, they will be honest to me, they will trust me, and so together we create a world in which it is better to live in. Right, so this is the idea.

And I think this is the first thing we should do perhaps in this happiness gym if we want to improve our happiness, if we want to see how we can make our lives better. I would begin, and perhaps we can talk about this in the comments, right? And I would personally begin by asking myself which virtues do I actually have in my life and which do I not have. And this second part is the most important and is also the most painful because you have to admit to yourself, at least privately—you don't have to do it publicly—but privately, you have to be honest with yourself which virtues you do not have.

So, for example, for myself, I would say I am often lacking patience, especially with people who are close to me, with friends, with family, with colleagues. When something goes wrong, I'm not always the most understanding or the most patient person. So this is something that I recognize as a lack of my virtue, and there I would say that if I want to improve my happiness, this is something I would have to work on. I would have to try to get a balanced set of virtues. This is another thing that's important for Aristotle. You cannot just have one virtue; you have to have all of them in a balanced way.

And we will see later what this means exactly, but you can start already by thinking, you know, which virtues do you not have as much as you would like to, or if you are honest, you know, as much as you think would be good to have, and what can you do to practice them, what can you do to improve them because the important point is, and with this, we end, that this is not given by God or by birth or by your genes. For Aristotle, the virtues are something you can practice. You have the opportunity every day to practice, let's say in my case, my patience, when, you know, my children do something that tries my patience, then this gives me an opportunity to actually practice it. And when somebody else, you know, annoys me in the street, perhaps a car driver cuts me off and in some way annoys me, this gives me again an opportunity to practice this virtue.

And so I think that this is a good starting point. You know, look around which virtues do you not have to the amount that you want. Also, of course, which ones you have. There's no need to feel bad about oneself; you can also be happy about the virtues you have developed, and then perhaps think how you can practice and how you can improve the virtues that you are lacking.

And surprisingly, you know, helping you along this way are exactly the people who you think are bad for you. So for example, in my case, people who test my patience by annoying me are those whom I need in order to improve. So this would be the thing: try to bring yourself into situations in which your patience is tested, or your honesty, or your whatever it is that you feel that you have a lack of, and then these people will give you an opportunity to practice and to get better at it.

So that's it for today. Thank you for being here, and I would love it if you would tell me in the comments what you think of this. You don't need to talk about your personal lack of virtue, but just in a general sense, you know, do you think that this advice makes sense for you, and do you think that it is useful? Do you think that you got something out of it?

I have another question, by the way. I'm filming this in front of a green screen, obviously. I cannot have all these backgrounds of lakes and sunsets, so this is a green screen, but I'm wondering whether you think that it's good to have these photographic backgrounds that are nice to look at, or do you think that this looks fake and pretentious, and you would prefer perhaps a more neutral background, you know, I could have a background of a wall or of some abstract color. Tell me also in the comments if you like which kind of background would be good, which you would like to look at, and should it be changing from video to video, should it always be the same like a setup that doesn't change and only the content of the video changes? I would be interested to know what you like to look at.

Okay, that's it. Thank you for today, and see you tomorrow with another little practice of Aristotle. Bye-bye.