The Pursuit of Happiness

We all want to be happy, but it is not easy to attain happiness. Wanting happiness and knowing how to attain it are not the same thing. We naturally ask ourselves: How do I attain happiness? What is the good life? The Pursuit of Happiness: Living the Best Possible Life explores these questions from Aristotle’s point of view and brings his ethical philosophy into conversation with the challenges of modern life. Living the best possible life begins by asking a series of reflexive questions that turn our attention toward our existence, who we are, and how we live. Am I merely existing and floating through life without direction? Am I following the current, absorbed in routines and distractions? Or am I actively directing my life and developing my capacities in ways that allow me to flourish? This book presents an interpretation of Aristotle’s ethical project as a pursuit of the best possible life: a life in which our activities are ordered toward human flourishing and the highest human good. The author’s engagement with Aristotle began thirty-eight years ago while living overseas, when he first read the Nicomachean Ethics at age twenty-six. That encounter eventually became the subject of a master’s thesis more than two decades later. This book is an expanded and substantially revised version of that work, rewritten in contemporary language for the general reader and expanded with new material. The final chapter brings Aristotle’s questions into the digital age. We live surrounded by an unprecedented amount of information, distraction, and competing demands for our attention. How can we pursue happiness and live the best possible life while remaining mindful of the forces that shape our attention, choices, and way of living? The Pursuit of Happiness: Living the Best Possible Life invites you to step back, examine how you are living, understand what human flourishing requires, and consider how you might live more fully and deliberately.