Eudaimonia: The Good Life

Is a good life something you get by avoiding disease for as long as possible? That's the undercurrent of conventional and alternative health alike: eat this, don't eat that, test this marker, and you get to postpone the bad thing a while longer.

Avoidance, as a lifestyle.

The Greeks had a word for what a good life really is: eudaimonia. Flourishing. The highest human good. But it comes with a paradox that I think undermines 21st-century civilization: the good life depends on getting your physical needs met, and focusing on getting your physical needs met pushes the good life away.

Every advertisement you've ever seen runs on this paradox. So does most of religion, most self-improvement, and nearly all of the wellness industry.

In this episode I show you the way out, which isn't a question of "how do I stop doing this," but, instead, "what am I getting out of this?" I tell you how my cigarette addiction fell away without willpower once the special biological program had nothing left to do. Then I give you the four questions, in the right order, so that you can get the good life, too.

Listen now: https://mindtreehealth.co/blog/the-good-life-eudaimonia

New here? Start at mindtreehealth.co/start for the free training on how this all works — how you author your own symptoms, and how to find the conflict underneath them.

And if you want to practice the four questions with people who are doing the same thing, Quintessence Tribe is where we talk about this live: mindtreehealth.co/quintessence-tribe