“More than two thousand years ago Aristotle used a term that is still in wide use in psychology today: eudaimonia. It refers to a state of deep well-being in which a person feels that their life has meaning and purpose. It is often contrasted with hedonia (the origin of the word hedonism), which refers to the fleeting happiness of various pleasures. To put it another way, if hedonic happiness is what you mean when you say you’re having a good time, then eudaimonic happiness is what we mean when we say life is good. It is a sense that, outside of this moment, regardless of how pleasurable or miserable it is, your life is worth something, and valuable to you. It is the kind of well-being that can endure through both the ups and the downs.”
I find this second factor to hold more immediate implications than the first factor when considering the reasons why the Bach sons continued to support the “outdated” music of their father (Bergquist, 2023a) or the reasons why Carol Gilligan sustained a relationship with her mentor (Lawrence Kohlberg) while refuting his theory (Bergquist, 2023c). In the case of Abraham Lincoln and team of rivals, the matter of survival (conducting the Civil War) was probably relevant—though the war was being fought not for survival of specific human beings (in fact many people did not survive the war) but the survival of a fundamental principle (abolition of slavery) that was more eudaimonic in character (Bergquist, 2023b).
21st Century Challenges
This is all well and good—to know that survival may have depended on interpersonal relationships in times past and that Aristotle got hold of a fundamental truth about happiness—but what about human survival in mid-21st Century society? Waldinger and Schulz address this question (2023, pp. 28-29):
“The human animal is not much different today, though the project of survival has taken on new meanings and complications. Compared to centuries past, life in the twenty-first century is changing faster than ever before, and many of the threats to our lives are of our own making. Along with challenges related to climate change, growing income inequality, and the vast complications of new communications technologies, we must deal with new threats to our internal states of mind. Loneliness is more pervasive than ever before, and our ancient brains, designed to seek the safety of groups, experience those negative feelings as life-threatening, which leads to stress and sickness. With each year that passes, civilization is presented with new challenges that were unimaginable even fifty years ago. It also presents new choices, which means life paths are now more varied than ever. But regardless of the pace of change and the choices many of us now have, this fact remains: the human animal has evolved to be connected with other humans.
To say that human beings require warm relationships is no touchy-feely idea. It is a hard fact Scientific studies have told us again and again: human beings need nutrition, we need exercise, we need purpose, and we need each other.”
Waldinger and Schulz seem to be fully aware of challenges inherent in what I have identified in this series of essays as the VUCA-Plus world (vulnerability, uncertainty, complexity, ambiguity, turbulence and contradiction) (Bergquist, 2023a). They write about the “haze” of competing priorities (the ambiguity and contradiction of VUCA-Plus), as well as the challenge of forecasting what makes us happy (the complexity and turbulence of VUCA-Plus) Waldinger and Schulz, 2023, p. 30):
