Modified: February 12, 2022
happiness
This page is from my personal notes, and has not been specifically reviewed for public consumption. It might be incomplete, wrong, outdated, or stupid. Caveat lector.A New Yorker article on happiness: http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/a-better-kind-of-happiness discusses happiness as a source of health -- loneliness is physically stressful -- but also explores different types of happiness and which ones seem to give lasting benefits.
There is happiness as
- hedonism
- as a final goal to be attained
- Aristotle's "eudaemonic" happiness, meaning, "living in a way that fulfills our purpose".
and there's some evidence it's really the third which matters. But there's disagreement on what constitutes "eudaemonic" happiness. Is it:
a combination of rationality and virtue?
seeking excellence and goodness?
transcending self-gratification to connect to something larger?
Research on personal projects shows that to bring us happiness, a project must be meaningful in some way, and we must have efficacy over it in some way.
And it seems that this is achievable without necessarily requiring connection to others (a core project can be a solo endeavor as long as it's personally meaningful). But certainly there are lots of potential core projects that do involve connection.