Eudaimonia & Wellbeing

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.

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

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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.

“Yes, I’m ambitious,” a friend told me recently, “but climbing the corporate ladder does not interest me like it used to. A title, a bump in pay—it’s not satisfying. What I need to feel successful and fulfilled is completely different. Am I doing something that brings satisfaction? Do I feel like I’m learning? Do I feel like I’m contributing? Do I... See more

Instead of a commitment to "winning" other people's games, I felt a commitment to design a life that I deeply enjoy inhabiting 3. I saw how my ambition can be unleashed not just in work but as a husband, father, friend, gardener, writer, citizen, and whatever other components now make up my fluid and evolving identity. It's not that I didn't... See more

A few weeks ago, the Scottish American philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre died, aged 96. His best known work, After Virtue , is an extraordinary book. Despite its considerable impact over the past few decades (it was published in 1981), it still reads as a startlingly original, radical critique of modern society, and of moral philosophy itself.... See more