Eudaimonia & Wellbeing

Yes, philosophy is a serious, rigorous academic discipline, with a lot of people reading Wittgenstein in the original German and pontificating away in a paywalled journal article. But it’s also, I think, a discipline that is meant to resonate with our ordinary lives, our real lives outside the ivory tower. In our real lives, we’re falling in love... See more

The purpose of moral principles, or more particularly moral virtues , is to guide us towards our telos . Once we lose the crucial concepts of character and potential, we are left with a morality consisting of abstract rules, or an acceptance of “human nature” as it is, or judgements about particular actions removed from their proper context. As... See more

love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don't search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even... See more

I’ve come to realise that recognising opportunities for what they are calls for more than just keen observation; it needs a fundamental shift in how you perceive and interact with the world around you. It’s not an easy shift, or a comfortable one. But honestly, any growth demands that we become strangers to our former selves, and any change is a... See more

Something strange and wondrous begins to happen when one spends stretches of time in solitude, in the company of trees, far from the bustle of the human world with its echo chamber of judgments and opinions — a kind of rerooting in one’s deepest self-knowledge, a relearning of how to simply be oneself, one’s most authentic self. Wendell Berry knew... See more