Happiness is not a state as far as Aristotle is concerned; it’s an activity, and you just have to decide to become happier....
Happiness is not a state as far as Aristotle is concerned; it’s an activity, and you just have to decide to become happier.
The ultimate goal of human life is, simply, happiness, which means finding a purpose in order to realise your potential and working on your behaviour to become the best version of yourself.
It means every encounter and every day of your life and every decision you take, trying to do it in a measured and deliberated way until it becomes habitual.
Being nice is not just a matter of enlightened self-interest. There is an intrinsic wellspring of good feeling about yourself that does actually supply a feeling of contentment.
The top three tips for getting in touch with your inner Aristotle:
1) Be honest - know your vices.
2) Review all your relationships, which should all be based on full-blown reciprocal trust. Aristotle had a system for dealing with friends and relatives who don’t come up to scratch - you simply demote them according to his categories “primary”, “pleasure” and “utility”.
3) Think about your death. Look to the end. Because it makes you get on with things. It’s about thinking of your life like a biographer while you are doing it, that your life is an art.
Something strange has happened to our way of thinking - and as a result, even stranger things are happening to the world. We have come to believe that everything is computable and can be resolved by the application of new technologies. But these technologies are not neutral facilitators: they embody our politics and biases, they extend beyond the boundaries of nations and legal jurisdictions and increasingly exceed the understanding of even their creators. As a result, we understand less and less about the world as these powerful technologies assume more control over our everyday lives.
Instead of a utopian future in which technological advancement casts a dazzling, emancipatory light on the world, we seem to be entering a new dark age characterised by ever more bizarre and unforeseen events. The Enlightenment ideal of distributing more information ever more widely has not led us to greater understanding and growing peace, but instead seems to be fostering social divisions, distrust, conspiracy theories and post-factual politics.
We are able to record every aspect of our daily lives by attaching technology to the surface of our bodies, persuading us that we too can be optimised and upgraded like our devices. Smart bracelets and smartphone apps with integrated step counters and galvanic skin response monitors track not only our location, but every breath and heartbeat, even the patterns of our brainwaves. Users are encouraged to lay their phones beside them on their beds at night, so that their sleep patterns can be recorded. Where does all this data go, who owns it, and when might it come out?
Compiled by Usama Rasheed
