The Questions  ·  the self · the good life

What is a good life?

Aristotle said happiness is the thing every other good is secretly serving. He did not say happiness — he said eudaimonia, and the man who translated it did more damage than anyone else in the discipline.

A strong self does not hand you a good life.

It makes you the cause of the life you end up in.

What this settles

Which is a smaller claim than the one the question usually gets, and it is made deliberately, because it is the one that is true. Strength does not promise the outcome. It moves the authorship.

Not this question

If the good life isn’t the happy life, what is it?

Also in this footing, and a different question. It answers that eudaimonia is not a mood — and the translation is the error the whole opening turns on.

Also asked as

Where this is worked out

dialogue

Is the Good Life Something That Happens to You?

Items without a link are sessions, shorts, strand reads or frameworks that live as video or audio rather than as pages. Everything Philosophy Zero puts out is listed on the Shelf.

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.

Where this question sits

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.

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