What is happiness? Is it even worth pursuing? Is a happy life different from a meaningful one?

In this episode I try to clear up some confusion surrounding the word “happiness”. We typically think of happiness as being synonymous with positive emotion—joy, bliss, excitement, all of those kinds of emotions—but Nietzsche hates this. He tends to define true happiness as involving a strong sense of meaning or purpose and he tends to harshly criticize anyone who ignores this component of happiness. And indeed, the science does seem to align with him on this point. I compare Nietzsche’s criticisms of this purely hedonic happiness with the founder of modern positive psychology, Martin Seligman’s PERMA theory of human well-being in addition to my usual exploration of what these issues have to do with everyday people like you and me.

Some Sources/Further Reading:

The Portable Nietzsche edited and translated by Walter Kaufmann
Basic Writings of Nietzsche edited and translated by Walter Kaufmann
Bett, Richard. “Nietzsche, the Greeks, and Happiness (with Special Reference to Aristotle and Epicurus).” Philosophical Topics, vol. 33, no. 2, 2005, pp. 45–70. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/43154726.
Existentialism by Robert Solomon
From Rationalism to Existentialism: The Existentialists and Their Nineteenth-century Backgrounds by Robert Solomon
Spirituality for the Skeptic: The Thoughtful Love of Life by Robert Solomon
Nietzsche: A Very Short Introduction by Michael Tanner
Happiness: A History by Darrin M. McMahon
Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert
Flourish (A Visionary New Understanding of Happiness and Well-Being) by Marin Seligman
Is a Happy Life Different From a Meaningful Life?
Take the PERMA-profiler

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