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Aristotle was the opposite. The effective
creation of happiness, for Aristotle,
cannot be done alone. Friendships are
the cement that holds society together.
Humans may enjoy brief periods of
solitude, but they flourish optimally
when they live in association with other
humans and animals and engage in
reciprocal good deeds. He talked a lot
about the importance of really close
friends, that you can complete each
other, and this can get better in time,
the more things go on between you and
the more you trust them. But he also
said that you don’t have time for more
than four or five of these friends, in
order to give properly. Aristotle made
a distinction between three categories
of friends: As well as those very close
friends—‘friendships of the good’—you
have ‘friendships of the pleasure’.
These are friends you love being with
and with whom you share interests;
you may go swimming with them or
go drinking with them. And then you
also have ‘friendships of utility’, which
sounds awful, but we do have them
all the time. The mothers at the
playground, the neighbors who feed
your cat when you are away, and
many of your colleagues. And all
these friendships are also very
important for the community. Because
when you get more love and more
respect from everybody else, the
whole community becomes happier.
What I find very interesting is that
Aristotle also stressed the importance
of leisure. That makes him very
modern as well. His radical ideas
about leisure have implications for ourof developing whatever talents you
have and fulfilling any desires you
have. He strongly believed that we’re
all born with a massive potential, but
he put the emphasis on the individual
to do something with that potential.What is the first step you have
to take?
Well, you have to first decide that you
will try to develop whatever potential
is inside you. But the core of my book
is about knowing yourself. That’s the
starting point of really trying to apply
it. It requires, in the beginning anyway,
a lot of hard work and thinking about
what behaviors you’re ashamed of,
or at least are making you unhappy.
You do have to work very hard on
yourself and how you behave and be
very honest with yourself. Because it
won’t work if you’re not, if you delude
yourself. If I speak for myself; I know
that I can be very resentful. I love
revenge but I know it won’t make
me happy. And what if I learned not
to pursue it, except of course when
we’re talking about questions of actual
justice. When someone hurts my
children, or breaks into my house
and destroys my property, the revenge
is appropriate. But spending the next
30 years obsessing all day, every day
because of some bad thing someone’s
done to me or said to me will not make
me happy. So this is something I’ve
had to work on. I’ve had to let go of
a lot of vindictive anger. But everybody
will have a different set of things to
deal with in order to be the best
version of themself.But in the book you say you have
to keep on working on happiness.
Yes, happiness is a verb, not a noun.
You don’t suddenly arrive at it and
then it’s a state that you’re in forever
afterward. You have to keep on
working at it, every day; continually
thinking very hard and carefully about
your decisions, making them in a
serious and careful way, and working
constantly on your virtues and vices.
Aristotle believed that if you train
yourself to be good, you will discover
that a happy state of mind comes from
habitually doing the right thing. In fact,
the only way to be a good person is
to do good things. You have to treat
people with fairness repeatedly. As a
co-parent, you need to happily stick to
the childcare agreements made with
your ex, no matter how angry you are
with them, and always pay the cleaner
in full if you cancel their session. We
are inclined to let negative emotions
guide us in all kinds of situations, but
if you consciously try to do the right
thing, after a while you will start doing
it unconsciously and automatically.
That’s the beauty of it: once you’ve
internalized the habit, it goes without
saying and you’ll see that you feel a
lot happier.
Aristotle talked a great deal about the
value of friendships and the community.
Friendship was absolutely huge for him.
According to him, one cannot be
human and cannot flourish without
it, because we are fundamentally
social animals. Many other ancient
philosophers focused on themselves,
preferring to be alone in a cave, but