There is a question that has haunted philosophy since at least the fourth century BC, and which self-help culture has been failing to answer ever since: what does it actually mean to live well? Aristotle had a clear position. In the Nicomachean Ethics, he drew a distinction that still holds up remarkably well — between two kinds of happiness, which we might call the shallow and the deep. The first he called hedone — pleasure. The satisfaction of appetite. The feeling of getting what you want. There is nothing wrong with hedone in itself; Aristotle was not an ascetic. But he recognised that pleasure is inherently unstable. It arrives, it peaks, it fades. You pursue it again. It fades again. The hedonic life — the life organised around the accumulation of pleasurable experiences — is, structurally, a life on a treadmill. You are always slightly behind what you need to feel satisfied. The second kind he called eudaimonia — often translated as happiness, but the word really means something closer to flourishing, or living in accordance with your deepest nature. Eudaimonia is not a feeling you have. It is a condition you inhabit. It arises not from getting what you want but from exercising your distinctly human capacities — reason, virtue, friendship, creative engagement with the world — at their fullest. It is, crucially, not something you can chase directly. It is, as Aristotle understood it, a byproduct of living well. This is where it gets interesting. Nearly two and a half thousand years after Aristotle, Alan Watts — drawing on Taoist and Buddhist thought — arrived at something remarkably similar from a completely different direction. Watts observed that the Western mind has a peculiar habit: it treats happiness as a destination, something to be pursued and captured. But the act of pursuit, he argued, contains within itself the seeds of its own defeat. When you chase a feeling — joy, peace, contentment, love — you place yourself in a relationship of lack toward it. You are the person who does not yet have the thing. And the more urgently you reach for it, the more vividly you confirm your own distance from it. Mark Manson, synthesising Watts for a contemporary audience, calls this the backwards law: the more you pursue a positive experience, the more that very chasing becomes a negative experience in itself. You cannot think your way into flow. You cannot effort your way into joy. You cannot chase your way into contentment. The pursuit is the problem. On the surface, Aristotle and Watts seem to be saying the same thing. And in one important sense they are: both are pointing at the same structural error in how most people approach their own wellbeing. Both are observing that happiness — in its richest sense — is not a direct object of pursuit but something that arrives, if it arrives at all, through a different kind of engagement with life. But the differences are equally revealing. Aristotle’s alternative to hedonic chasing is active. Eudaimonia requires effort, practice, and discipline. You cultivate virtue over time. You develop practical wisdom through repeated action. You build deep friendships through sustained commitment. The good life, for Aristotle, is something you construct — painstakingly, deliberately, over a lifetime — even if its rewards cannot be directly grasped. There is a kind of striving in Aristotle, but it is striving in the right direction, toward the development of character rather than the accumulation of pleasant feelings. Watts’ alternative is, in a sense, passive — or at least radically different in quality. For Watts, the move is not to strive differently but to release the striving altogether. To allow rather than pursue. To be present to what is already here rather than reaching for what is not yet there. The Taoist term is wu wei — effortless action, or more precisely the action that arises when you stop forcing. There is no curriculum for this. No virtues to cultivate. No telos to work toward. There is only the quality of attention you bring to this moment, right now. This distinction matters enormously in practice. Aristotle gives you something to do: become the kind of person who flourishes by developing specific excellences over time. Watts gives you something to undo: release the grasping habit that prevents you from noticing that what you are looking for may already be present. Both are right. They are mapping different aspects of the same terrain. Perhaps the synthesis looks something like this: Aristotle is correct that there is a kind of life — structured around virtue, practice, community, and meaning — that produces flourishing as its natural consequence. And Watts is correct that no amount of anxious striving toward flourishing will produce it, because the anxiety is itself the obstacle. The good life, it seems, requires both a direction and a quality of presence. You need Aristotle’s map and Watts’ willingness to stop gripping it so tightly. Or, as Mary Oliver put it — with no apparent knowledge of either Aristotle or Watts, but with the instincts of someone who had clearly understood both — tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life? The answer she modelled, lying in the grass watching a grasshopper, was neither passive nor striving. It was something else entirely. Fully engaged. Fully present. Going nowhere in particular. Flourishing. Related notes: [[Nicomachean Ethics — Aristotle]] · [[Alan Watts]] · [[Flourish — Seligman]] · [[Acceptance & Commitment Therapy]] · [[Flow — Csikszentmihalyi]] · [[Mary Oliver]] Tags: #philosophy #eudaimonia #hedonia #aristotle #alanwatts #backwardslaw #happiness #flourishing #wellbeing