Episode 11 - HAPPINESS: The Pleasant Life, the Good Life, and the Meaningful Life

We’ve been discussing happiness.

Aquinas views the desire for happiness as ingrained in and being inseparable from, our humanity. We want to be with God because we desire happiness. We are made for Him.

There are some schools of thought based on an idea that we should be disinterested in happiness and entirely focused on serving God and others. That’s not how human nature works.

Happiness is sometimes used to refer to just feeling good or pursuing pleasure. We are talking about something broader than that.

Humans are pretty good at giving up a short-term pleasure in favor of more fulfilling activities. Think in those terms.

We are embodied persons, not spiritual machines. There’s a mental and emotional life that we want to have in alignment with our spiritual life.

Here’s a perspective on happiness offered by positive psychologist Martin Seligmann. He suggests three levels that exist simultaneously for us:

The Pleasant Life - appreciating basic pleasures like companionship, our environment, and our bodily needs.

The Good Life - creatively using our unique virtues and strengths to enhance our lives.

The Meaningful Life - fulfillment in employing our unique strengths for a purpose greater than ourselves.

We all need to learn to set the pleasant life aside for something bigger. Hopefully we learn this before we waste a lot of time pursuing pleasure to the exclusion of the bigger picture.

At the same time, remember that the pleasant life has a role to play in contributing to what it means to be a flourishing human. To be a human that can live up to his or her potential. That gets things done. That is effective. That wants to be here.

Give the pleasant life some respect. It has a role to play for you.

The good life is about engaging character strengths, those virtues and talents that you have, those things you like to use when you're doing good - when you're making things happen, and accomplishing things. When you are using your strengths, it’s helpful to create engagement - that sense of being involved, of making a good effort.

Everyone has things they do well. Leverage those if you want the good life. It creates a lot of satisfaction. If you feel like a cog in the machine, it’s tough to show up at your best.

Engagement is often overlooked when we are thinking about “what’s missing” in life. We often have pretty good intuition about other factors. When the activity is engaging you in a worthy challenge aligned with your values and virtues, it starts “pulling you in,” and you are likely in a role where you are effective and have enjoyment or at least satisfaction.

The meaningful life involves living with purpose and meaning; connecting your strengths, your values, and who you are, to something that's bigger than yourself, and making a contribution to something bigger than you. This requires action.

Focusing on your strengths, your values, and your highest purposes is so helpful. If you are focused on somebody else’s values, or what somebody else thinks is what you “should” be doing, it starts to feel like you are living somebody else’s life. That you lack choice.

God made you uniquely and for purposes that you and He will work out. Fitting into someone else’s schema for your life is not such a great plan. Because you were made to freely choose. It’s up to you. You have to own this and step into it.

Nobody will do this “for” you. You do it.

Listen to the podcast, we had a fun convo on these topics.

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