MAKING ARISTOTLE YOUR LIFE COACH

Happiness is both an aspiration and a commodity. For all the smartphones, cars, clothes and real estate our money can buy, we still yearn for our happy place, that somewhere beyond the rainbow.

- Shreevatsa Nevatia

We all want to be happy, but, happiness, at the best of times, proves to be woefully short-lived, and at the worst of times, wholly elusive. While modern psychiatry sometimes reduces happiness to chemicals—we’d be happy only if we had the right amount of oxytocin and serotonin coursing through our brain—pills, we know, can make us feel good, but they do little to repair heartbreak and hardship.

On the surface, our problems seem specific to the times in which we live, but dig a little deeper and you’ll find that human beings have been asking variants of the same questions for centuries, if not millennia. What does it mean to be good? What should be our life’s goal—happiness or contentment? Do I need others to feel fulfilled? Can people actually change? How can I be the best version of myself?

Before motivational speakers and self-help gurus, these lines of enquiry were once the mainstay of the world’s philosophers. Someone like Aristotle, for instance, believed it was your “responsibility” to flourish, to be “happy”. Sadly, however, today we mostly remember only biographical detail about the Greek thinker—he was teacher to Alexander the Great— not so much his interrogation of the good life. For the most part, Aristotle and other Western philosophers such as Marcus Aurelius, Michel De Montaigne, Friedrich Nietzsche and Simone de Beauvoir are dismissed as being highbrow or complex.