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 postpone the bad thing a while longer. Avoidance, as a lifestyle.

Even in Germanische Heilkunde we spend most of our time on diseases and what to do about them. Useful, necessary - and still talking about health in terms of lack of it.

But the fifth biological law says life is about evolution. Every special biological program is meaningful in the context of my evolution.

So instead of asking "How can I stop or prevent this special biological program?" I need to be asking, "What's the benefit I'm getting by creating this special biological program?"

The paradox

The Greeks had a word for the good life: eudaimonia. Flourishing. The highest human good.

But it comes with a paradox attached. One I think sits at the root of 21st-century civilization:

The good life depends on having your physical needs met. And focusing on getting your physical needs met pushes your good life away.

Both halves are true, which is what makes it a vicious circle. You cannot flourish while you're cold, hungry, frightened about money, or terribly alone. Nothing higher happens on an empty stomach. But in pursuit of those needs, we climb onto a treadmill, and the good life always sits just past the next acquisition.

Once you see it, you see it everywhere. Every advertisement: here's a good life, it's behind this purchase. The wellness industry: your good life is real, it's just eleven protocols away, and we accept credit cards.

You cannot win this tug-of-war from inside it. If you ignore your needs they don't go dormant; they get bigger and they take more of your energy until you meet them. But if you chase your needs, the finish line moves.

And if you win a Deus ex Machina — the money, the body, the freedom — adapting to conditions you asked for costs so much attentional energy that many people end up miserable after getting exactly what they wanted (and feeling guilty about it).

Escaping the eudaimonia paradox

The way out starts by refusing the question your whole culture asks, health industry included: how do I stop doing this?

Ask instead: what am I getting out of this?

Because you wrote the special biological program. The compulsions and stuck patterns you wrestle with run in your own psyche, and you're the one who wrote them...for a reason.

Many of these patterns do start as implants in the formative years, when we accepted what we were handed without judging it. But the pattern you run now, you're writing now. And you keep it because it gets you something. It helps you meet a need.

I smoked from the age of eleven, and quit several times, always miserably. Then, when my son was a baby, I started asking what I was getting out of it. The answers kept coming for two months. It got me outside every couple of hours. It put a boundary between one activity and the next. It moved me away from people who tried to control me.

This isn't an argument for smoking. But once I could see what the program was for — what eleven-year-old me and all the mes after that had achieved with it — I dropped it. No willpower, no patch. I just never got around to buying cigarettes again, because the special biological program had nothing left to do.

You don't quit a special biological program. You make it redundant by bringing it into consciousness: by letting yourself see which need you're meeting with it.

In the episode, I walk you through the four questions that get you there: feel, problem, desire, need. The hardest question goes last so that we don't write new special biological programs to try to cancel out the previous special biological programs. That's how one conflict branches into the next in the pattern I call the MindTree.

You don't have to earn eudaimonia. You have to stop chasing it long enough to feel it. Listen now.