Dreams and Perceptions
I’m sure you all feel it sometimes. It doesn’t matter how productive you are, how successful you are, or how many to-do list items you’re checking off, you still get that nagging feeling. Am I doing enough? Am I falling behind? Why haven’t I achieved my goals and dreams? Will I ever manage it?
In our quest to be productive, I feel that we’ve lost touch with one of the fundamental pursuits of our lives. We are constantly tormented by ever-growing task lists, taking on obligations that never cease, building up savings accounts that seem to evaporate against the tides of inflation. Some of the best paid and supposedly successful professionals in our society are chronically miserable. And for the rest of us, the not best paid part of the work force, the costs of our dreams seem to rise more quickly than our means of reaching them. Just as often, even our simplest aspirations get set aside for later, while we struggle to meet the practical demands of life. Enough never feels like enough, and every goal reached is replaced by a new one on our ravenous quest for progress. We love advancing towards our goals, oftentimes more than we actually enjoy meeting them, constantly at the whims of our dopamine system and its desire to pursue, to want. Trying to count the number of things I find myself wanting every day is immense, and of course many of them are passing fancies and whims that will swiftly be forgotten, replaced by new desires that feel oh-so urgent. I think by now most people are aware enough of this hedonic treadmill to have some degree of self-awareness about that phrase, “If I had x I could finally be happy.” If you still repeat this mantra to yourself, it’s certainly worth a pause to reflect. How many of these benchmarks inhabit your past? How many exams did you dearly need to pass, how many jobs did you dearly need to get? How many fitness goals, injury recoveries, vacations? If it made you happy, whatever that means, why do you need the next thing to fill that void instead?
There are countless dreams of ours that lay, and will always lay, outside of our control. I often nurse a fantasy of a self-sufficient homestead, where I grow my own food, raise livestock, do almost everything I can to be self-sufficient and independent from the constant turmoil and madness of modern life. I have a family, a dog, and plenty of free time to read and explore. As the cost of living and land continued to grow I felt like this dream was slipping through my fingers. I still often feel that way. I think about it with frustration, brooding over the ineptitude, self-interest, and insanity, both mine and of others, that seems to be actively trying to make my life worse. Or I drive myself as hard as I can into entrepreneurial ventures, hoping perhaps that at the end of it I’ll have my golden ticket, some cash cow that will open the door to my ‘finally happy’ future. But this little homestead, this secure life I like to dream about is, of course, a fantasy. There is no beautiful tranquil security there – animals will get sick, early winters will kill my plants, my tools will break, my house will leak, and perhaps at the worst possible time, I’ll throw my back out or break my ankle. The tax man will come, ever and eternal, and hold out his hand in askance – and no, he does not accept tomatoes. And then, just like always, I will be at the mercy of the outside world, ever bearing down on me, with its crushing, unrelenting reality. And even if it was the perfect, idyllic little homestead, free of all worries, it would never truly be mine. Nor the wife, the dogs, the family. It will be taken away one day – perhaps tomorrow. A bad storm, a housefire, a revolution, an accident, or simply the slow march of time. None of it would belong to me, and do what I might to acquire and protect it, it never will. It belongs to fate, and to pretend otherwise is delusion.
This sounds morose, but it’s leading somewhere, I promise. I don’t mean to sound like striving is irrelevant, that wanting things and acting in the world to acquire and protect them is foolish. It gives us purpose, a sense of agency, and in many cases, this striving is itself pleasurable, even if it’s often grueling, frustrating, or depressing. Manifesting our agency is exhilarating, and we do genuinely have the capacity to exert ourselves on the world and change it to suit us, sometimes in magnificent ways. Without the striving, the ambition, having everything given to us at the snap of a finger, life would be boring. Without desire, there is little to motivate us to do anything, including going on with life, especially when it’s hard. But it bears reminding that these external things are always fragile, and that if our happiness is contingent on them, it too will always be fragile. The more of these things we acquire, the greater the dread of losing it all. Sometimes things are going really well – I’m advancing in my career, I’m happy with my girlfriend, my hobbies are engaging, yet that often seems to somehow be the time when the existential dread really creeps in. I lie in bed and think about how I could lose it all, tomorrow, for any countless number of reasons. And somehow, in the snap of a finger, these things that bring me joy instead bring me distress. This sensation, in the Buddhist view, is labelled “upadana“, often translated to ‘attachment’ or ‘clinging’, and it is one of the core causes of suffering.
According to the Stoics, there was only one thing we truly controlled, and that was our own judgements. Not the things, but our view of the things. In truth I’m sometimes dubious of even this, as it seems to me we can lose the soundness of our mind just as surely as we can injure a shoulder. All the same, we have something unique in the form of our consciousness, and it is ultimately the only thing we can actually be certain that we have. So long as we are capable of conscious judgements and decisions, we ought to exercise this faculty with deep gratitude and relish. Our perception of events can fundamentally alter how we feel about life, and how we behave in response to it. The ache of a good workout versus a frustrating nagging injury may physically feel similar, and yet our judgement of that sensation – whether mistaken or not – results in commensurate pleasure or suffering.
There is a proverb in Zen Buddhism, “The obstacle is the path.” This proverb marks one of many invaluable perspective shifts, changes of judgement about a situation that can radically change how we feel about it in the moment. It is easy to feel frustrated or dispirited when something stands in our way, or a difficulty prevents us from doing what we set out to do. I often find myself cursing under my breath, ‘Why can’t this just be easy for once?’, especially when I feel like it should be easy. But to remind oneself that this difficulty is part of the experience of our life, and indeed oftentimes fundamental to it, has often dispelled my frustrations. And to borrow something from Stoicism, adversity is a blessing. This obstacle is not an impediment, it’s an opportunity. Indeed, if everything were always easy, we would never have this rich training opportunity, which prepares us for the inevitable adversity that lies in our future. It is a test of our skill, of our knowledge, of our patience, of our capacity to overcome difficulty with tact. It’s an opportunity to learn, adapt, and become more formidable people. Ex Navy Seal Jocko Willink managed to laconically capture this entire principle with a single word, whenever he encountered adversity: “Good.”
Another beautiful perspective shift can be offered by Jigoro Kano, the founder of the martial art Judo. Kano expressed the principle of Seiryoku Zenyo, which translates roughly to best use of one’s energy. In Judo, this idea is usually manifested by a skillful application of power at an optimal time, using an opponent’s weight, momentum and balance against them. In his writings, Kano laid out that this principle is not merely a fighting technique, but a philosophy of life, to be applied in all our actions. By deciding in advance, for example, that you will not lie, you eliminate the countless decisions you would have to weigh if lying were an option. You free yourself of the cognitive load needed to reconcile your many deceits, and the worry of getting caught. There is a tradeoff, of course, as there are for all choices, but it is your unique privilege to decide on your principles – it is one of the only things, in fact, that truly belongs to you, even if the consequences of acting by them does not. By making a judgement and committing to behave a certain way according to principle, you eliminate indecision, and you build character.
Character
The ancient Greek word for moral character was “Ethos“, a word we often use in English today. The term “Guiding ethos” describes a fundamental belief that drives the action of an individual, community, or organization. It is the word from which we get “Ethics,” a superficial version of which many of us are inundated with in our work life, with banal mandatory “ethics training”, or perhaps appraisal of your work ethic. Despite this nauseating corporate ritual, we must acknowledge that all companies have an ethos, even if it is not always the one they proclaim in their interminable training modules. There is indeed a reason why corporate culture is often an obsession of managers – because if your employer can influence your character, they can mold and predict your behavior. I do not believe any amount of hour long training modules has affected anyone’s character except for the worst, but your character is nonetheless constantly influenced by every aspect of your life within a group. Perhaps your boss asks you not to tell your colleagues about your pay raise, or suggests you let them know, quietly, if anyone is slacking off. Or, more charitably, perhaps your boss or employer really do advocate and protect honesty in your dealings, and forthrightness in your behavior. In all these cases, your individual character will either be in conformance with the group’s, or it will not. You will not be able to control their expectations of you, or the consequences for violating their conditions, but your inviolable seat of agency always lies in the degree to which you will bend to conform to them.
My intuition often points me to an idealistic conviction: “Always follow your own conscience, and hang the cost.” It would be very principled to do so, don’t get me wrong, and I confess I greatly respect the tenacity of people who are capable of it, even when they are misguided or hold beliefs I disagree with. These people, we must agree, have strong character, even if we may not agree with their principles. Still, there are always practical considerations – to what extent does ‘Always tell the truth’ descend to unconstructive petty remarks, careless expressions of poorly thought out snap judgements, or annoying pedantic interjections and corrections on even the tiniest details? There is often a tactful balance to be struck in any domain of principle. To tell the truth does indeed often require considerable thought and care, because how often can you be completely certain you’re right? Does this suggest, then, that sometimes not speaking at all is superior to blurting out whatever you believe at the present moment? And yet it is easy to identify people who are, perhaps, a little too flexible with their morals, who will shift effortlessly from one principle to another, who will behave however they think people want them to behave. They will agree or disagree with whatever it is fashionable for them to agree or disagree with, sometimes tenaciously, if they feel like they can lean on the support and acceptance of the wider culture – whether it is a small group, or a national one.
Many of us, especially those who grew up in western democratic cultures, have naturally adopted a stubborn individualism, a desire for “authenticity”, and an aversion to authority. It’s worth noting, of course, that this is still its own cultural artefact. Everyone subsumes their own identity to a larger one to some degree. This is your culture, the ethos of your wider group, and it cannot be escaped. Really, it ought not be escaped. True independence and solitude tends to drive people utterly mad. If you were to be truly independent of culture you would also need to sacrifice your language, and virtually all of the concepts you’ve inherited over your life. You would abandon all scientific progress, philosophical insight, and practical parental advice. You would be more like an animal than a human. It’s no coincidence that the work that followed Aristotle’s Ethics was Politics, and to the ancient Greeks life amongst one’s community was deeply interwoven with individual character. All the same, there is a delicate balance to be struck between our personal agency and our place in a larger whole.
The American philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson makes a vigorous argument in favor of our individualism. Emerson might well have scoffed at my entreaties to ancient Greek words and long-dead philosophers – allow me to quote him with some irony: “The centuries are conspirators against the sanity and authority of the soul… Man is timid and apologetic; he is no longer upright; he dares not say ‘I think,’ ‘I am,’ but quotes some saint or sage.” To Emerson the ultimate good was born of our own intuition, that core to yourself independent of all your social conditioning. It is a piece of you that transcends the lessons of your parents, your workplace, your church, or your favorite author. Emerson exhorts us, “Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.” He urges us towards honestly and authenticity – virtue, yes, but not virtue for appearances sake. We must be beholden to no one but our own conscience, our own potential – to try to be someone else, he argues, is to always be a poor copy. “Insist on yourself; never imitate. Your own gift you can present every moment with the cumulative force of a whole life’s cultivation; but of the adopted talent of another you have only an extemporaneous half possession.”
To Emerson, this insistence on our personal agency, the mastery of our present self, reigned over our past as well. He considered it foolish to feel beholden by obligation to our past selves, to insist on consistency if we alienate our present intuitions. We often come into new information, new insight, but reject it because in the past we had disagreed with it, or rendered contradictory judgments without that information. Indeed, we often unthinkingly inherit ideas with barely any use of our judgment whatsoever. To enslave ourselves to these past judgments and actions is to abdicate our agency, our ability to make decisions in the present. “A reverence for our past act or word because the eyes of others have no other data for computing our orbit than our past acts, and we are loath to disappoint them. But why should you keep your head over your shoulder? Why drag about this corpse of your memory, lest you contradict somewhat you have stated in this or that public place? … Speak what you think now in hard words and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day.—’Ah, so you shall be sure to be misunderstood.’—Is it so bad then to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.”
This priority of our present self over the past – as well as the future – is important to our conception of character. There are two other words besides Ethos outlined by Aristotle that are worth considering in our study, and the first is energia – often translated to ‘active condition,’ or simply ‘action.’ Its inverse was pathos, a passive condition – which came to us through the Latin passio into our modern passion. To the Greeks, pathos often pertained to suffering, undergoing, or being affected by something. It is not action’s opposite in terms of it being inaction, which is sometimes how we view the word ‘passive’, but instead that we are being acted upon. We could be afflicted by fear, for example, and this would be a passive condition. From this pathos, this uncontrolled affliction, is derived an energia, our action. In the face of a pathos of fear, one might flee, or demonstrate courage. Either of these responses are active conditions, behaviors that must be performed and maintained, regardless of what passive condition triggered it. By engaging in an active condition, you are expressing your agency, for better or worse. You are making a decision, even if that decision might be something like freezing in place. You will never have complete control over your circumstances, of the various forces that will be acting upon you, but with effort, you can cultivate your ability to respond to these forces wisely.
When many of us think about matters of character, we often have a tendency to assume that other people’s experiences are if not the same then at least similar to ours. We think that they feel the same sensations of hunger on a diet, craving in response to an addiction, or anxiety in response to social pressure. In truth, the variability here is immense, and caused by countless factors outside of our immediate control. Our genetics, our childhood, our education, our culture. It is easy to feel helpless in the face of this – to know that perhaps your hormonal makeup makes you feel twice as hungry on a diet, that your neural wiring impedes your ability to resist your desires, or that an emotionally impoverished upbringing has made you cold and distant. There is much to be said for these things, but it’s always worth remembering that whether they are intense or not, they are a pathos acting upon us, and we still have an opportunity to cultivate, little by little, how we respond to these impulses with our own agency. It may genuinely be twice as hard for you as the next person, but you must cherish your sovereignty all the same, reflect upon the difficulty, and foster the tenacity to say “Good.” You can know that in this adversity, this obstacle, you have a greater opportunity to refine yourself into somebody who can overcome your circumstances. All of these difficulties are opportunities to strengthen your agency. Even if others may never really understand, even if it was so easy for them and so hard for you, all the better.
Now that we understand pathos and energia we can begin to understand our second important Greek word, hexis. A hexis is a more stable state, often characterized as a habit or disposition in English, and it is the foundation of one’s character. These states dispose us towards certain actions, whether good for us or not. By our nature some of us are more disposed towards certain things, but by application of effort our actions can also be manifested into these patterns, which become more intuitive to us with their repetition. Whether it is cowardice or courage, deceit or honesty, stinginess or generosity, gluttony or temperance, all of these behaviors accumulate into stable patterns that we settle into. With every obstacle we endure, we are given a choice of how we will respond – and in making these choices again and again, we establish a hexis. As we habituate, this exertion of effort becomes more seamless, natural, and intuitive to us. There is a quote commonly misattributed to Aristotle, spoken by William Durant, “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.” I’m a fan of this more concise and snappy aphorism, even if it didn’t come directly from Aristotle.
It’s worth noting the circular nature of a hexis. Habit and character can form either a virtuous or vicious cycle. By repeated good or bad choices, we entrench them more and more deeply, and create an ever stronger pathos that acts upon us making either virtue or vice more natural to us. This pathos we create is manifested both in our internal state – our mood and emotions – as well as our environment, which are constantly affected by our choices. The people we associate with, the orderliness of our home, the the things we accumulate. If you spend your days in a room with a well-stocked beer fridge versus a good set of dumbbells, what forces will be acting on you day by day? If the first thing you read in a day is always depressing or infuriating news media, how will that affect your disposition over time? It is important to remember that every little decision you make in the moment can stretch forward into the future.
We must endeavor not to be beholden to our poor past choices, even if they will inevitably exert force on us. It is easy to despair, especially if we are plagued by the consequences of our past mistakes. Bad health, crippling addictions, a bad reputation, a mountain of debt. We often look back on our poor patterns and conclude that we are hopeless, that we have proven time and time again our incapacity to escape from circling the drain. The philosopher and neuroscientist Sam Harris provided an excellent framing by which we can, at any time, for at least this moment, let go of these judgments and ‘begin again.’ This idea is really the foundation of forgiveness, and can be practiced in all sorts of circumstances. He uses the example of a bad workout at the gym, where you haven’t been making much of an effort. “The moment you notice this ghost of mediocrity hanging over the present, you can fully exorcise it just by beginning again, and then fully commit by relinquishing the past. There’s no real reason why the next ten minutes in the gym can’t be the best you’ve had all year. There’s no real reason why you can’t put this conversation, that’s almost over, on a new footing by saying something that is truly useful.”
This principle is a beautiful one, and the awareness of it has saved me many times in my relationship with my partner and friends. One small remark or accusation sparks annoyance, heat begins to rise in argument, and then – with almost the snap of a finger – it can be diffused by merely acknowledging it, taking a breath, and resetting the tone. The number of times I’ve simply recognized and apologized for a thoughtless remark, or just made note that I’m frustrated and it’s affecting the tone of the entire conversation, and turned an argument back into a constructive conversation is astounding to me. Beginning again is fundamental to maintaining a state of mindfulness, not being locked in the past or future, and it provides an opportunity at every second of the day to interrupt cycles of failure and disappointment, and reset your active condition to one more in line with who you want to be. In time, over many instances, this will begin to influence your dispositions as well, improving your character, and improving your life. Of course this is not a panacea, you will not pay off your debt by merely acknowledging it and beginning again, but you certainly may practice it when you are reaching for your credit card.
The Eudaimonic Path
So what’s the point of all of this? Why does character matter more than productivity, say, or immediate pleasure? Well, if the Greeks are to be believed, it was because virtue and good character were the only means by which one could attain Eudaimonia – flourishing. This can be translated to happiness, though I often feel that our modern conception of happiness – an emotional state which we try to grasp and hold onto – is a desolate trap and a greater cause of suffering. That form of happiness, that pleasant feeling or sensation of joy, is nothing more than another pathos, eternally ephemeral – it will slip between your fingers every time you reach out to grasp it. It will evaporate at the first whiff of bad news, and crumble after a bad night’s sleep. Better, I think, that we learn a lesson from the Greeks here, and pursue Eudaimonia. In doing so, you will still dispose yourself to joy, and find it in the most unlikely of places – but rather than clinging to that emotional feeling with desperation and fear of its loss, with upadana, you will have something more formidable and beautiful.
As you might guess from the name of my blog, I find the concept of Eudaimonia deeply inspiring. Even the word itself is one I find delightful. It translates more literally into good spirit, and though I’m not superstitious, I’ve always found the idea of this daimon as a guardian angel charming – my good conscience and reason, the impulse inside me driving me towards virtuous action. The Latin word for this spirit was genius, and indeed came to inform our ideas of those inspired individuals. This good spirit can also map onto Emerson’s intuition, that divine thing intrinsic to us that we must treasure. It can nudge us towards better choices, and as we pursue things such as philosophy, we better refine our understanding of what virtue really means. What are my values? Should they be universal, or are they personal to myself? How should I behave in the world, to live well? What does living well even mean?
Much ink has been spilled on these questions, and it will likely continue to spill until the end of time. All the same, let’s ask Aristotle: “The human good comes to be disclosed as an active condition of the soul in accordance with virtue, and if the virtues are more than one, in accordance with the best and most complete virtue. But also, this must be in a complete life, for one swallow does not make a Spring, nor one day, and in the same way one day or a short time does not make a person blessed and happy.” To Aristotle, a complete virtue was one that was practiced for its own sake, rather than the sake of other things. This can often be deduced by practicing the classic child-like game of answering why you do something with another “Why?” If you want to get six-pack abs, why? To look better? Why? To be attractive to women? Why? To find a partner? Why? To build a family? Why? To be happy, or attain Eudaimonia. We want this final step for its own sake, it is a greater good than mere pleasure, which is also a means by which we strive for happiness. Pleasure without happiness is hollow, after all. And so, we pursue the choices that we believe will lead us most practically towards this ultimate end, what Aristotle called a Telos. Note too, that Aristotle calls it an active condition, Energia, an ongoing application of effort. In order to achieve this goal we must act in accordance with virtue, day by day, consistently. We do not simply attain it, like some transcendent enlightenment that allows us to live in a state of bliss forevermore, but we must embody it every day, and in doing so, we dispose ourselves towards happiness. But why virtue? If Eudaimonia is meant to be pleasant, should we not be maximizing pleasure?
There is a concept in addiction literature known as the “Primrose Path”, which involves making a choice that is immediately beneficial or pleasurable, but over the course of many repetitions, becomes a net negative. And yet, even as conditions continue to get worse, it still appears to be the best or most pleasurable choice, even if it will make your future conditions worse and worse, and ultimately reduce your ‘total’ pleasure, so to speak. This is the natural spiral of many addictions, where what was at first a pleasure becomes a craving, and any pleasure begins to warp into an alleviation of pain. This can be described in terms of “local utility” versus “global utility.” Take for example drinking alcohol. When considering only local utility – say, the next hour – it will almost always feel as though it is in our best interest to have another drink, and alcohol will have a high utility. We get the pleasure of the alcoholic buzz, the confidence, the euphoria, and in the old wisdom of the “hair of the dog”, it can even ameliorate hangover symptoms. Or it will take the edge off of any deeply unpleasant cravings we may have developed if we have become addicted. In the short term, it would appear to us that the ticket to living well is always more alcohol. But if we use our reason and consider our best interest over the course of a week, or a year – a more global perspective – we can very easily see that having a drink every hour would be catastrophic for our wellbeing and in fact not very pleasant at all. This leads us directly to the virtue of temperance, as a virtue that progresses us towards the Telos of eudaimonic happiness.
This idea can be extrapolated to countless other things – whether to eat another donut, whether to stay up late tonight even if you’ll be tired tomorrow, whether to skip the gym and watch Netflix. All of these things have both a local and global utility, which can sometimes be completely different. Careless hedonism is often a race to the bottom, a reckless focus on local utility without a view for its global consequences. But the inverse path is also true – there are many actions that have a low local utility that translate into an outsized global utility. Exercise, saving your money for a meaningful goal instead of ordering food, learning a new skill even if it’s difficult and frustrating, taking the time to have hard conversations with your partner in order to strengthen your relationship. Let’s call this the Eudaimonic path. When we are trapped in short term pleasure-seeking thinking, the Eudaimonic path always seems like it is choosing a life of less pleasure, like choosing a life of virtue means accepting a monk-like life of deprivation and sad Spinach salads. But the reality is that in many domains, the best way to maximize pleasure over time is not the same as how to maximize it in the immediate term. Remember what Aristotle said, “one swallow does not make a Spring, nor one day, and in the same way one day or a short time does not make a person blessed and happy.” Climbing the mountain may take more time and effort, but you’ll enjoy the view and fresh air on the way to the top far more than you will from the short tumble down to the wine cellar.
Our judgment, our one sovereign tool, is what lets us look upon any act, and determine whether it is a step down a primrose path or a Eudaimonic one. Our more primitive appetites and ancient lizard brain will often salivate at primrose paths, because they lack the capacity to judge further into the future. But often with even a little bit of thought we can sense what’s really good for us. We often know what we ought to be doing, though even when we don’t, by training our judgment – with education and experience – we can learn better how to identify it. This is really the root of virtue ethics. This is the core of what philosophy was meant to accomplish. This ability to distinguish between the two paths is, ultimately, wisdom.
Aristotle identified two key aspects to wisdom. There was Phronesis, practical wisdom or prudence, and Sophia, theoretical reason. Aristotle often lays considerable emphasis on practical wisdom – he is famous for his concept of the Golden Mean, which supposes that most virtues inhabit a mean between two extremes. These are not, however, the exact middle ground between two points, and are often in fact dependent on circumstance.
Let’s return to our example of temperance as a virtue. This inhabits a mean between an excess – let’s say over-indulgence – and a deficiency, such as apathy. Most of us are very familiar with the excess, having eaten ourselves sick, or drank too much wine, or spent too much time playing video-games instead of studying. The cost of over-indulgence is often clear, though sometimes it’s not obvious until long after its wreaked havoc on our bodies, minds and lives. And yet it’s worthy of note that temperance as a virtue is not the same thing as the abdication of all pleasure. This inability or lack of desire to experience pleasure is often associated with depression, and can potentially have just as detrimental an effect on our wellbeing as excess. Without desire, we are often rendered incapable of action. Despite the word ‘temperance’ often being associated with humorless puritanism and abolitionist tee-totalers, in its virtuous state it makes room for pleasure in the appropriate amounts, in order to maximize our wellbeing and reduce our dependency. Like tempering a sword requires both heat and cold to to make metal strong yet flexible, true temperance is skillfully navigating the extremes of excess and deficiency. This is of course a question of our judgment – what is appropriate for you may not be the same for someone else. The joy you derive from a cold beer on the weekend with your friends may truly add value to your life, while for somebody else it is a medicine for a deeply unpleasant craving, destroying their health. Temperance as a virtue pertains to our self-control, our capacity to master our desires so that we are not enslaved by them. Just like the tempered sword, this virtue is not so unyielding that it cannot bend at all, but not so malleable that it cannot resist pressure. Even when bent it can spring back into its shape instead of snapping or deforming.
The best thing about the Eudaimonic path is not that we are constantly doing things we find unpleasant in hope that in the future we might finally be happy. As I have already alluded, an over-emphasis of the future at the expense of the present is itself costly and potentially unhealthy. The reality is that as we build our capacity to do Eudaimonic things, we begin to enjoy them as well, and we also inoculate ourselves against suffering. And as we act rightly, the many other aspects of our lives – our health, our relationships, our surroundings – often become better too, and we become more capable of weathering the difficulties with courage and competence. Pleasure itself is not a vice, and cultivating the ability to feel pleasure from things that advance you towards your greatest wellbeing – virtue – is how we can best attain Eudaimonia. Not as this magical thing that we will finally have once we’ve paid off our mortgage, but a thing we can have now, as we act in our lives, doing the right thing today in such a way that we can still make our life better tomorrow.
Despite the fact that these more wholesome pursuits are often less stimulating all at once than their more addictive counterparts, we become much better adapted to extracting satisfaction without the crash we often get from more potent but unhealthy sources. I used to hate exercise of all sorts, now I find the challenge invigorating I and know that the burning feeling I used to hate means I’m making progress, becoming healthier and more capable. And indeed, by exposing ourselves to discomfort in a controlled manner, we also oftentimes inoculate ourselves against the unpleasantness. A good example of this is taking cold showers – when you start, this practice is absolutely wretched. Yet as time goes by you become adapted to it, or even learn to enjoy it, and once that is the case, the cold shower has lost its ability to make you suffer.
We also learn to inoculate ourselves against being enslaved by unhealthy pleasures, which often actually expands the number of things we can find pleasant. Addiction is sometimes defined as a narrowing of things we find pleasurable, until at its zenith the only thing that can satisfy us is the satisfaction of our craving. When I was addicted to sugary drinks, I found the taste of water dull. Nowadays, I can hardly tolerate the syrupy sweetness of a coke except on rare occasions, but I relish a cold glass of water, and my palette for sweetness has changed such that I don’t even want the excess. Our sensitivity to many things only becomes diminished with excess, requiring more to feel the same pleasure, whilst limiting the number of things that can induce it. And as the need for more increases, so does its potentially negative effects.
Emerson concludes his essay Self-Reliance with a beautiful passage that embodies this Eudaimonic pursuit, this emphasis of present willful process over the unchangeable past and the uncertain rewards of the future:
“So use all that is called Fortune. Most men gamble with her, and gain all, and lose all, as her wheel rolls. But do thou leave as unlawful these winnings, and deal with Cause and Effect, the chancelors of God. In the Will work and acquire, and thou hast chained the wheel of Chance, and shalt sit hereafter out of fear from her rotations. A political victory, a rise of rents, the recovery of your sick, or the return of your absent friend, or some other favorable event, raises your spirits, and you think good days are preparing for you. Do not believe it. Nothing can bring you peace but yourself. Nothing can bring you peace but the triumph of principles.”
Passion
Earlier I talked about Pathos, our root word for passion, and observed that to the ancients, it was often associated with suffering. If you’ve heard the phrase The Passion of Christ in regards to Jesus’ crucifixion, this was a classical use of it. Today passion has many positive connotations, often suggesting motivation and drive, and we are extolled to find our passion or that if you have a job you’re passionate about, you’ll never work a day in your life. If you just found your passion, you could finally be happy! I suspect what people mean when they talk about this is not to find what makes you suffer the most. Perhaps I’m a fool, but I had been led to believe that there is this intrinsic part of us, deep down, that has always known what we truly love, that pursuing this thing would make us happy, and we must unearth it. So I went about trying all sorts of stuff, reading book after book looking for my personal treasure map that could potentially lead me on the path to my passion. I liked history class in high school, so I guess I’ll do that for my undergrad? It’s… Maybe my passion? I can go become a historian, and finally be happy! Inevitably I would set into something with great interest, thinking perhaps I had finally found it, then my enthusiasm would wane as the work became more difficult or tedious, and I would conclude sadly that this was not in fact the buried treasure. Fool’s gold! Tricked again! And nothing but dirt and another hole to show for it.
Yet with much work, I’ve accumulated a few things I might be able to boast I am passionate about, such as philosophy, cooking, and arcane budget spreadsheets. And yes, history, too. But I don’t think my digging achieved my goal the way I was often led to believe. X does not mark the spot, stop looking for your buried treasure. You must dig, oh yes, but not where you think. Find a fertile patch, some dilettante interest, some mild curiosity, anything that draws your attention and holds onto it. You will find them everywhere if you look hard enough. Dig a little trench and plant a seed. A little passionfruit, if I may. Plant as many as you like, but remember, you only have so much water. And water it you must. Sometimes it will grow, sometimes it will wither, sometimes you will wonder if you’re wasting your time on this stupid little plant in this wretched plot of earth. Sometimes it will seem like it hasn’t moved an inch, but trust that its roots are spreading beneath the earth. I suspect that as you care for this plant of yours, and little by little become proficient in your new undertaking, it will eventually bear its fruit to you. Then, once you’ve had a taste, you’ll know you’ve found your treasure.
Mastery
I believe that the real answer to the find your passion riddle, for those of us not fortunate enough to have always known what it is, comes in the form of mastery. As you become more skilled, often by tedious, mundane, grueling effort, you will begin to delve past the surface level, the fantasy version you often have at the beginning of any new undertaking, and find complexity everywhere you look. Oh and the obstacles! Countless obstacles. God knows how many species of mite might infest my fantasy homestead, I certainly don’t. Some difficult things will become easy, some obstacles will be surmounted with great satisfaction, and other things you thought were simple will prove to have depths you hadn’t imagined, and seem impossible to find a way around. Often this will be frustrating and discouraging, but as you continue to explore any new subject or skill, you will begin to more deeply understand it, respect it, and learn to manipulate it to your own ends. You may find delightful tricks, techniques that overcome your obstacles and allow you to perform your task. Your body and brain will change to become more adept at doing things that used to be impossible for you. By mastering something, you are not just learning to manipulate something external to yourself, you are also changing yourself, understanding and intimately integrating into the world around you. When you have mastered something, you are no longer the same person who set out as an inexperienced apprentice. I believe there is something intrinsically satisfying about this act of mastery – it’s why we pursue hobbies even if they are impractical – but if the skill has high utility to you or others, all the better. By mastering it, you can improve your life in other ways, and still attain the intrinsic benefit.
The word technique, as it happens, comes from the Greek Techne, which meant art, skill, or craft. It pertains to the knowledge of making and doing things. We might consider our modern productivity in relation. A common definition of productivity would be maximizing outputs for a given number of inputs. Whether that’s time, space, or money. In many cases, this is done by application of skill or craft. It is worth noting, though that this ability is not in itself a virtue. Skills are generally a means to an end, and as we’ve already established, there are good ends, and bad ends. It is possible to be immensely productive, but if your outputs are of no use to you, then what was the point? There is the primrose path, and the Eudaimonic one. If your goal is Eudaimonia, then your skills must orient you in that direction, and the outputs of your productivity must support you in your goal. And so you must ask, as you delve the internet for the latest productivity hack, the trick to get to inbox zero, the best to-do list template, or how to shave a minute off your 5k. To what end? Why is this your aim? Will inbox zero achieve anything, or will more emails just barrage you ad nauseum, continuing to fill your inbox with digital trash minute by minute, even after you’re dead? Does dealing with every one actually make you better at your job, improving your life, or anyone else’s? Will running that marathon with an injured knee actually improve your health, or are you doing it just to check the box off your bucket list? Perhaps you quite simply enjoy it – all the better, but best you understand the goal, the real goal, before subjecting yourself to things that make you miserable, when there may well be other roads to the same destination.
I’ll repeat my definition of productivity: Maximizing outputs for a given set of inputs. Yet much like the primrose path, it often turns out that by jamming as much as we can into a small unit of time, squeezing the lemon of life in a wrist annihilating death grip, we wring out a respectable amount of juice, but quickly exhaust ourselves. And over a period of time, this can often reduce our productivity, or simply begin producing things of no value to us. There are two examples of this in from my own life that I see in many other people’s.
Let’s begin with the ever growing to-read list, a common affliction of mine, and perhaps of yours, if you’ve made it this far into an essay on Aristotlean virtue ethics. I really like to read, I enjoy the excited feeling I get when I’m exposed to a new insight, some nugget of wisdom that could somehow improve my life or change my perspective. In years past, I used to meticulously track how many pages I read, which I felt was a just metric, because rather than tracking the number of books, it didn’t prejudice me to read short works instead of long ones. I thought, if I measure it, I’ll be motivated to read more. More more more. There are too many good books out there and so little time. But in the end, it was always just a number. Since when was the point of reading to have a big list of things you’ve read that you can point at and go, “Yup, read ’em. That’s actually nearly six hundred thousand pages worth, I counted!” Could you imagine I boasted that to you? I somehow doubt it would fill you with glowing admiration, especially not when you ask me what I thought about a book we’ve both read, and all I could do is look at you with a blank expression as I struggled to recall even a sliver of knowledge from it. Heaven forbid I reread a book, when there are so many to choose from, I would never get through the list, and imagine all the insights I’d miss!
Slugging through that list like some book-reading machine is a fool’s game. As you run through your seemingly endless collection of information to consume, or learn about speed-reading to maximize the number of finished books that you think magically makes you an intellectual, once more you must ask: to what end? If you were to read at a rate that would get you through the ever-growing pile of literature, you’d struggle to retain an ounce of it. Was the point of reading these books to actually learn something? To improve your life somehow? Or was it really just about the list? Is the list working for you, or are you working for the list? Repetition is invaluable for memory, and to really understand anything with depth, you need to actually chew on it and digest it! You need to not only reread it, but talk about it, write about it, put it into practice. Of course there is nothing wrong with reading for pleasure, either, I often sit down with a book with no purpose but to immerse myself in it, but many of us do not read for pleasure. We read for productivity. We read for ways to get ahead, improve our finances, start our business, find our passion, or get through our to-do list. We delve for that one piece of advice that might just solve our problem so that we can finally be happy. Not only that, but we often enslave ourselves to our past curiosities and impulses, things we threw on the list because it sounded neat ages ago, things we might not even care about anymore. Why should I let this new interest cut the line, I’ve had Jung sitting on the backburner for months, and I really should get around to it! So we squeeze and squeeze and squeeze, we exhaust ourselves, and in the end, we get less pleasure and utility out of it than if we’d read far fewer things with much greater care.
The second example of mine is the jam-packed vacation. Maybe you’ve done it, at the very least you probably know someone who has. You’ve got a round-trip plane ticket, and you intend to extract every ounce of experience out of that narrow window of time between one flight and the other. Coming up on your vacation you scour the internet for all the best advice. The locations you simply cannot miss. The best restaurants, museums, galleries, parks, shows. If you were to miss any of it, you think, you’ve wasted your opportunity, an opportunity you may never have again – after all, for your next vacation, it would be foolish not to go somewhere new, jam packed with novel things to add to your list of experiences. And so you find yourself in Paris or wherever else, running around, sleep-exhausted, jet-lagged, hungry, tired, jetting from the Louvre – which despite containing countless days of cultural treasure only got a few hours of your busy itinerary – to the Eiffel tower. You snap a picture, check your watch, and hustle your way to the Arc-de-Triomphe. Every line you encounter is an agony, because you can practically hear your wristwatch ticking away, bleeding into the time you had set aside to to catacombs, and that’s on the other side of the damn city! Could they just HURRY UP?
If you’ve been here, you probably understand that it’s actually not that much fun. And sometimes you need to take a moment and ask yourself… to what end? Was the goal to leave your vacation with a big list of checked off locales that you briefly and impatiently existed within, or was it to really experience a new city? Was it to relax from a busy period at work? Was it to spend quality time with your family, who might well be every bit as irritable as you for this entire rushed, exhausting trip? In my experience it turned out that my favorite part of my trip was when I completely abandoned the itinerary and returned to Florence – a destination I had already barreled through – for a leisurely week. I ate at the same sandwich shop basically every day, wandered about, explored, checked out some lesser known attractions, and found in the end that I enjoyed my second visit much more than the first. Perhaps it bears reminding the little cliché, “It’s not about the destination, it’s about the journey.”
Ah, the destination. I still sometimes convince myself that it’s my charming little homestead, but it isn’t. The homestead is a means to an end, and not even a necessary one. The end, of course, is a good life, a life I’ve felt was well lived, one that brings me joy and satisfaction. Eudaimonia. And getting there, if Aristotle is to be believed – and personally, I believe him – actually just means being there. It lies in what we do today, not what we will have tomorrow. Not that we live as short-sighted hedonists, but as cultivators of our own virtue. It’s not nirvana, it’s not a transcendental state of bliss, it’s skill in action towards good ends. It’s the pleasure of a step up the mountain towards a summit I will likely never reach; but the exertion, the brisk air, the experience, and the striving all bring me joy anyway. And if there’s a boulder on the path? Good.
