The Questions · the self · the good life
If the good life isn’t the happy life, what is it?
One mistranslation has been carrying the weight for two thousand years. Eudaimonia came across as happiness, and the error is not academic — it changes what you would aim at.
Neither. Eudaimonia is not a mood, and the translation is the error the whole opening turns on.
A strong self doesn’t hand you a good life. It makes you the cause of the life you end up in.
What this settles
Which moves the good life out of the column of things that happen to you. A mood can be given and taken; being the cause cannot. That is why the answer is not a better feeling but a stronger self — the one thing in the account that no room and no fortune can hand over or withdraw.
Not this question
What is a good life?
Also in this footing, and a near-identical question. That one gives the answer plainly. This one clears the mistranslation that stops the answer from landing.
Also asked as
- What does happiness mean to you — a thing you have, or a thing you're in?
- Which of the two can be taken from you?
Where this is worked out
Is the Good Life Something That Happens to You?
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Nothing on this page is composed. Every sentence in the answer is drawn from the pieces listed above. Where a claim is compressed, it is compressed from one of them and adds nothing they do not say.
The good life
Whether a life happens to you or you are the cause of it — and why the happy life was never the same object. All 2 questions here have been worked through.
- What is a good life?walked