Times change, and today we live in a huge-bandwidth world with learning and growing opportunities unimagined by our ancestors. Still, these two existential questions remain for us as they did for Aristotle: What is happiness, and how do we achieve it?
There is progress to report. Faculty members at UC Davis are leaders in the study of the “science of happiness.” And while happiness research is in its infancy, three major points are emerging:
- the positive trumps the negative
- social participation trumps materialism
- generosity trumps selfishness
Sounds like common sense, right? But it’s all in how you define those concepts, and personalities and preferences count a lot. What makes an extrovert happy might not be the same thing that makes an introvert gleeful.
Everybody is different, of course, but some things appear to prod even the biggest grumps to crack a smile. No matter your personality type, thinking about happiness is a grand tradition in philosophical circles dating back to the dawn of civilization. In ancient Greece, Aristotle wrote extensively on the relation between pleasure and happiness in his Nichomacean Ethics.
“Aristotle’s own view was that the good life, the happy life, is a life of virtue or excellence,” UC Davis philosophy instructor G.J. Mattey said. “The more valuable a person’s powers are, and the more perfectly those powers are exercised, the happier the person’s life.”
