“Happiness is the aim of human existence.” – Aristotle
Boil most human motivations down to their essence, and what do you think you’ll find?
It’s a simple answer:
The desire for happiness.
Why do we want to be successful? Because we think it will make us happier.
Why do we want to fall in love? Because we think it will make us happier (ha!)
Why do we want to find meaning? Self-actualize? Get a six pack and a new Bugatti?
Right you are, Romeo:
Because we think it’ll make us happier.
Happiness might be the most widely sought-after goal we’ve got — and, as far as goals go:
The pursuit of happiness is one of the single biggest failures in human history.
Look around:
Everyone wants to be happy, and almost nobody is.
Humanity flat-out sucks at happiness, and the big, smiling reason is because…
We don’t even know what happiness is.
So in this email series, we’re going to swoop in and solve that problem once and for all (you’re welcome, humanity).
I promise to do my part, if you’ll do yours — starting with assignment #1:
Hit reply with your best definition of happiness.
Humanity at large — including some of our allegedly-best-and-brightest (looking at you, Jordan Peterson) — doesn’t seem to have a clue.
But you aren’t humanity at large, you’re the teeny-tiny-sub-1-percent of humanity that actually gives a damn about self-actualization.
So I think you can do better 🙂
Shoot your shot, and we’ll reconvene tomorrow.
– T
P.S. I spent last week outlining a session for this year’s summer retreat (t-minus 5 weeks, y’all) on this all-important topic of happiness.
I’ll share some of the key pieces in this email series, and members of The Path will get the full-length version when the recordings are released after our retreat.
A banger it will be.
