an incredibly common and familiar place of frustration and anxiety for many is the unanswered questions of what do i want to do? what are my ambitions? what am i passionate about? where should i invest my energy?
thomas directed my attention to this article about eudaemonia, the good life by martin seligman.
seligman writes about three kinds of a happy lives.
the pleasant life, which consists of having as many of the positive emotions as you can, and learning the skills that amplify them… the smiley, giggly view of happiness… positive emotion.
eudaemonia, the good life…knowing what your signature strengths are and recrafting everything you do to use them a much as possible. the pursuit of happiness…the pleasures of contemplation and the pleasures of good conversation…when one has a good conversation, when one contemplates well. When one is in eudaemonia, time stops. You feel completely at home. Self-consciousness is blocked. You’re one with the music.
The good life consists of the roots that lead to flow. It consists of first knowing what your signature strengths are and then recrafting your life to use them more — recrafting your work, your romance, your friendships, your leisure, and your parenting to deploy the things you’re best at. What you get out of that is not the propensity to giggle a lot; what you get is flow, and the more you deploy your highest strengths the more flow you get in life.
the pursuit of meaning… meaning consists in attachment to something bigger than you are. The self is not a very good site for meaning, and the larger the thing that you can credibly attach yourself to, the more meaning you get out of life… joining and serving in things larger than you that you believe in while using your highest strengths is a recipe for meaning.
anyone seeking to answer those initial questions, seeking to keep their life nourishing and fullfilling, seeking to invest their energy in the most fruitful places, is wise to practice eudaemonia. it’s amazing how deeply connecting with our signature strengths has the power to stop time, liberate us from self-consciousness, empower us to feel at home, enchant us into becoming one with the music, inviting us to continuously flow, flow, flow.
seligman’s website, authentichappiness.com, offers many questionaires and resourses to discovering your signature strengths and realizing your potential for lasting fulfillment. if you visit the site and take any of the tests, be sure to let us know what you think.