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What if I gave you three million dollars and just one goal — be happy?
A year later, after the dopamine rush had died down, would I find you busy with the typical things people claim make them happy? Would you be drinking great wine, eating your favorite foods, and watching netflix? Would you actually be happy?
The pursuit of leisurely pleasure wasn’t what the Socrates and the Stoics had in mind with their versions of happiness.
The Greek word Arete, which is often translated as happiness, actually refers to excellence and moral virtue. Eudaimonia, another kind of Greek happiness, was the goal of Greek philosophy. It roughly means, “human flourishing.”
The switch from pleasurable hedonism the deeper satisfaction was modeled by the Bengali polymath Rabindranath Tagore: “At first I thought that life was joy. Then I learned that life was duty. Finally, I acted and, behold, duty was joy.”