Happiness & the Meaning of Life
Happiness & the Meaning of Life is a philosophical study of the art (and science) of living well. The course explores the writing and philosophy of Aristotle, Seneca, the Buddha, Epicurus, William James, and many others. Expect to learn perennial lessons (and practices) to help you flourish in the modern day.
Many things are beyond our control. We discover that the world refuses to bow to our commands by walking our path.
Wisdom traditions have many names (and practices) for accepting and aligning ourselves with how the world works. The Stoics advise us to live in accordance with nature. The Taoists say to live in the flow of life, and spiritual traditions have phrases and practices like acceptance, surrender, and letting go.
In Beyond Good and Evil, the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche wrote about the notion of saying ‘yes’ to life:
I want to learn more and more to see as beautiful what is necessary in things; then I shall be one of those who make things beautiful. Amor fati: let that be my love henceforth! I do not want to wage war against what is ugly. I do not want to accuse; I do not even want to accuse those who accuse. Looking away shall be my only negation. And all in all… I wish to be only a Yes-sayer.
The longtime psychotherapist and author David Richo (a previous podcast guest) explains in his book, Five Things We Cannot Change, that there are unavoidable givens (or immutable facts) that come to visit all of us repeatedly:
Everything changes and ends.
Things do not always go according to plan.
Life is not always fair.
Pain is part of life.
People are not always loving and loyal all the time.
When we learn to accept and embrace these fundamental truths, writes Dr. Richo, we realize that they are precisely what we need to gain courage, compassion, and wisdom—in short, to find real happiness. Likewise, psychologist Carl Jung believed that “givens can be embraced with an unconditional yes to that which is, without subjective protests, an acceptance of the conditions of existence… an acceptance of my own nature as I happen to be.”
According to Dr. Richo,
Such a yes is a willingness to land on concrete reality without a pillow to buffer us. Such a yes makes us flexible, attuning us to a shifting world and opening us to whatever life brings. Such a yes is not a stoic surrender to the status quo but a courageous one—an alignment to reality.
To surrender to how the world works is not losing or giving up; it’s deciding to grow up. It involves submitting to the notion that there are eternal truths and that the art of living requires us to live in accordance with those truths—not despite them.
The strange thing about wisdom (and life in general) is how paradoxical it can be. An unconditional yes is a yes to the paradoxes of life.
