The Best Self-Help is Free: The Myth of Complete Happiness

This is Chapter 3 of The Best Self-Help is Free, a treatise by Mr. Stolyarov. You can read all chapters of this freely available work here.

Before you proceed on any path to self-improvement, you need to recognize that you will never be completely happy - ever. In fact, complete happiness is neither a possible nor a desirable state, when we define happiness in the sense in which most of our contemporaries use that word.

First, let us distinguish between classical happiness and contemporary happiness. The fact is, happiness as defined by most of our contemporaries did not even occur as an idea to most people in most ages of human history. Their lives - surrounded by death, disease, pestilence, famine, war, tyranny, injury, trauma, filth, and psychological abuse - were simply far too miserable to conceive of anything so fanciful as a trouble-free life. The best our ancestors were able to come up with as regards happiness is the Aristotelian concept of eudaemonia or classical happiness.

Eudaemonia says nothing about being free of troubles or gratifying one's every desire. Rather, it is a highly sophisticated approach to ethics - entailing prudence, virtue, moderation, and self-restraint in all things, from work to pleasure. Classical happiness is highly entwined with the use of one's intellect in rational judgment and the pursuit of knowledge. A classically happy person recognizes his own limitations and is able to thrive within them by enjoying what is accessible to him and not stepping outside the bounds of the tried and true. He can achieve his full potential while recognizing that his potential is limited - often in rather severe and tragic ways. If he experiences difficulties or great sufferings, he bears them with dignity, content that his troubles do not overwhelm him or erode his composure.