Eudaimonia & Wellbeing

we are allowed to know peace, to feel ease, to experience softness and deem it sacred. we are allowed to be well without needing to earn it through agony.

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

It takes a particular kind of courage to pour energy and attention into something that you can't yet fully explain or justify to others. Committed seriousness requires a stubborn blindness to conventional metrics of success or importance. You have to be willing to treat something as significant purely because you've decided it is.

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

A large percentage of people’s problems in work, love and life are due to some combination of vagueness and passivity. You don’t know what you want to spend your time on; you don’t know what kind of person you really get along with; you don’t know what kind of clothing looks good to you; you don’t know what you value in a city; you don’t know how... See more

The Harvard Study of Adult Development has assessed the connection between people’s habits and their subsequent well-being since the late 1930s.

The happiest, healthiest people in old age didn’t smoke (or quit early in life), exercised, drank moderately or not at all, and stayed mentally active , among other patterns. But these habits pale in

... 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