Midlife: A Philosophical Guide

That realization showed him the eternal error men make by imagining that happiness consists in the gratification of their wishes.”13

We can escape the self-destructive cycle of pursuit, resolution, and renewal, of attainments archived or unachieved. The way out is to find sufficient value in atelic activities, activities that have no point of conclusion or limit, ones whose fulfillment lies in the moment of action itself.

“The self may not be something, but neither is it nothing. It is simply ungraspable, unfindable.”28

You need the mastery of mental focus, of your own thoughts and feelings, that is nurtured by mindfulness meditation.

make friends for the sake of saying goodbye.

on Aristotle’s theory of middle age as the prime of life, the body being most fully developed from thirty to thirty-five, the mind at forty-nine.

In pursuing a goal, you are trying to exhaust your interaction with something good, as if you were to

Those only are happy (I thought) who have their minds fixed on some object other than their own happiness; on the happiness of others, on the improvement of mankind, even on some art or pursuit, followed not as a means, but as itself an ideal end. Aiming thus at something else, they find happiness by the way.8

In the Nicomachean Ethics, named for his son, Nicomachus, Aristotle argued that a good life is one of virtuous activity in accordance with reason. His word for happiness or human flourishing, “eudaimonia,” has been adopted by psychologists who distinguish self-realization or “eudaimonic well-being” from “hedonic well-being” or the experience of ple

Think twice before you wreck your home. Is it the space inside you hate, or the fact that it has walls?