I’m on that pursuit of happiness and I know everything that shine ain’t always gonna be gold. — Kid Cudi
We all know that the point of a good life is the pursuit of happiness, right? I mean, it says it right there in the constitution. “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness” are among the inalienable rights that the Founding Fathers based the whole American experiment on.
And we live that creed every day. The basis of liberty (definition: the power to do as one pleases) is that we’re free to pursue whatever makes us happy. Our entire reason for existing as a nation is that “extending the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity” (From the Preamble) was worth fighting a war over.
But here’s the crazy thing that no one ever spelled out for me. There’s more than one kind of happiness.
When most of us think about being happy, we mean feeling pleasure. It’s good food or entertainment. Maybe it’s a drink at the end of the day while you’re sitting on the couch and finally getting to Season 2 of Miss Maisel.
The ancient Greeks had a word for that: hedonism. We have a lot of negative connotations with the word today, but it literally means the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain. I think we can all agree that pleasure over pain sounds like a pretty good idea.
To a Classical hedonist, it meant that the pursuit of pleasure was the highest ideal for our lives. The most you could really ask for is to have a little more pleasure today than yesterday. And then want a little more tomorrow. If you have to choose something you’d like to do vs. something you really, really don’t, just choose the one that makes you happy right now. Voila, happiness.
Except you know that doesn’t work. Hedonism often leaves us unsatisfied with what we’ve got and simply wanting more. Pleasure in the moment is fleeting. A Netflix binge and too many beers may feel good at the time, but when you’re bloated and tired the next morning, your happiness is long going. It’s a state called the Hedonic Treadmill and much smarter people than I have written literal volumes on it.
But what’s the alternative? In every moment of every day, you make decisions on what to do. The most immediate pleasure is usually the path of least resistance, due in no small part to the intensely complicated pleasure machine that you’re carrying around between your ears.
But there is an alternative called Eudaimonia. At its core, Eudaimonia is about human flourishing. Instead of just pursuing pleasure in the moment, Edumonia suggests that the point of human life is…wait for it, becoming better humans!
It presumes that there is a best version of each of us and that the pursuit of that best self is what makes for a good life. I don’t know about you, but the best version of myself is most definitely not purely hedonic. He doesn’t come home and veg out in front of the television every day. He doesn’t skip the gym because it’s cold out. He doesn’t put off doing household chores. He’s charitable with his time and with his heart. In short, he’s virtuous.
Aristotle linked the practice of virtue with Eudaimonia, and most importantly, saw Eudaimonia as a project, not an end in itself like pleasure. We can only pursue our best self by pursuing our best self. How’s that for a life goal that keeps on giving?
So the next time you have a decision to make, try to think about more than just the pleasure at hand. What would lead me to be my ideal self? Sitting down to read or starting a new season of reality tv? That’s not to say that your best self doesn’t need to unwind every once in a while, but keeping Eudaimonia in mind can serve as a reminder that there is a deeper, more sustainable good to pursue. In the short term, you might have a little less immediate pleasure, but you’ll soon be able to look back on positive decisions that you made. Now, you can honestly see yourself a long-term thinker and virtuous actor, which means the next decision you make starts from a different place. And so on and so on.
With both hedonism and eudaimonia, the decisions that we make each day can feed on one another and form a chain over our lives. With hedonism, we’re not left with much at the end of that chain, but with eudaimonia, we find ourselves ever closer to flourishing as our ideal selves.
In light of that choice, it’s hardly a difficult decision on which direction to go.
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