Ancient and Modern Ideas of The Good Life: Transcending Comfort For Creativity
Our ancient ancestors could not be certain of such basic needs as food. At times, life was a desperate struggle. Just getting through the day alive would make anyone feel like a hero. Today, many people can be confident that their basic material needs will be met. Lacking a daily heroic and desperate struggle for mere survival, our societies have organized themselves into a sort of competition to be the most comfortable, measured by uniform, homogenized goods and services. Modern notions of the good life revolve around owning and consuming the things we are told it is good to own and consume. Much the advice given and received focuses on reducing the stress of chasing our rather arbitrary goals. While some people have brain chemistry issues that are best treated with medicine, it’s possible that a lot of the medicine prescribed today is used to treat the effects of stressful yet boring compulsory pursuit of hedonism.
Eudaimonia — A Better Idea of the Good Life
Hedonism is not working. It is literally driving us mad. Millions of bottles of pills to keep us moving along the treadmill. We know what hedonism is — the Greek word for pursuit of pleasure as guiding principle in life is broadly applicable and widely used. Hedonism’s quiet cousin Eudaimonia, on the other hand, is relatively unknown.
Aristotle dedicated his life to mulling questions of ethics, both for individuals and for the state. The goal of such reasoning was to guide individuals and society to the good life. Realizing you can’ achieve something without defining it, Aristotle dedicated a lot of thought to “Eudaimonia,” which literally means “good spirit” but can be translated most accurately as “human flourishing.” For Aristotle, health, wealth, and beauty were desirable aspects of the good life, but the central most important thing was virtue.
Pinocchio and the Argonauts
The modern (1883) fairytale Pinocchio’s Island of Toys is a heavy-handed warning against hedonism aimed at children. On the Island of Toys (or Pleasure Island in the Disney film) bad children are not required to study or work; they misbehave with impunity and get everything they want without effort. But the Island has a sinister purpose. The boys’ unrestrained desire literally turns them into donkeys, to be used for labor.
The theme is not an entirely new one; nearly two millennia before, the story of Jason and the Argonauts includes a similar episode. This crew of ancient mariners happened the island of Lemnos, populated only by women. The lonely sailors were pretty thoroughly distracted from their mission of finding the golden fleece until Hercules urged them to focus up and continue on their quest.
The Hero with A Thousand Faces
The notion of turning away from comfort towards a challenging project runs through many cultures. Comparative mythologist Joseph Campbell speaks of “the hero with a thousand faces.” With this concept, he evokes an archetype that he demonstrates crosses through many cultures. All cultures, he says, share the “monomyth.” The story of a hero who lives in the ordinary world, is called to the extraordinary, rises to the challenge and returns transformed is universal. In a nutshell, everyone has always known that personal development through challenge is the highest achievement.
Hillman Follows Jung
Carl Jung posited that in the first half of life, we normally focus on establishing our social and economic status. In the second half of our life, we begin to sense the imminent inevitability of death. If we have a healthy response, we will begin to question and search for meaning in life. This search for meaning should lead us to look within and identify our strengths. Having identified them, we cultivate them to create the best, most creative version of ourselves that can offer the most to the world, perhaps leaving a legacy that can, in some small way, transcend death. Jung calls this maturation “individuation.”
Psychologist and author James Hillman puts this concept at the center of his book The Souls’ Code: In Search of Character and Calling. In Hillman’s view, it is not only nature and nurture, biologically inherited or learned traits, that guide us. Hillman believes in a soul, a soul that can point us toward our highest potential. Echoing the etymology of the word “eudaimonia” Hillman calls this soul by the Greek name “daimon.” Within each of us, says Hillman is an acorn. If we can discover it, we can grow it into a mighty oak of manifested potential.
Hawtrey & Scitovsky Reveal The Good Life
More recently, it has occurred to economists that if they want to talk about “management of the household,” with a goal of happiness in mind, they must, like Aristotle, understand happiness before they can tell you how to obtain it. In 1926, Ralph Hawtrey identified a distinction between goods and activities that aim to relieve pain, which he called defensive goods and those that produce pleasure, which he called creative goods. Scitovsky elaborated on these ideas decades later, describing Hawtrey’s defensive goods as “comfort” and the creative goods as simply “pleasure”.
Once we have a certain amount of defensive or comfort goods, we may be sated, whether we realize it or not. Our appetite for food is finite. We may believe that more food or a larger house will make us happier, but any such change in happiness will be temporary. We see a lot of pursuit of comfort in the world today. Our economies and societies are organized around it. But there are diminishing returns for comfort goods — once you have a certain amount, getting more doesn’t make much difference
Creative goods, on the other hand, may not ever begin to bore us. Why can creative consumption provide sustained pleasure? Scitovsky provided the answer by inviting economists to consider the insight of psychologists and neuro-scientists. The secret is arousal, created by novelty. For instance, when you read a novel, you follow the plot, uncertain where it will lead, anticipating the next development with excitement, discovering the unknown. If it is a good novel, you can re-read and perhaps enjoy it even more, discovering new layers of subtlety. Some holidays can be rather plodding and conventional, leaving you bored before they are complete, but others offer complexity and variety, novelty and fascination. The feeling of discovering something entirely new and unexpected every day leaves you wishing such a holiday would never end.
Explore The Art of the Good Life With Rascal
Please join us as we continue on our conceptual journey to the heart of the art of the good life. You can follow our articles here on Medium if you have an account, or simply bookmark our Medium page or follow us on Facebook.
We’ll tell you about the most popular course in the history of Yale, Psychology and the Good LIfe, and how you can take it for free and share musings on the Midas myth and the common themes of behavioral economist Tibor Scitovsky and the myth of Eros and Psyche. Want to get inspired? We’ve got an article on defining your life project. For insight into the struggle between happiness and perfection, check out our article on satisficers vs maximizers and Bruce Lee’s theory of the top dog and the underdog. We will tell you how you can add years to your life in our article on the benefits of yoga and tell you about what meditation can do to make you more productive and less stressed. We also consider some more abstract topics, like John Maynard Keynes thoughts on the art of life, or non-being and its place at the root of luxury, or the conceptual art color the blackest black, Vantablack. If you are a gourmet, you might want to check out these fine dining restaurants in Bali that could be contenders for a Michelin star. Enjoy!
