Episode # 005 - Transcript

Thank you for wanting to know more today than you did yesterday, and I hope you love the show.

But before we begin, a quick note on how to approach listening to this episode. Try to treat it like a self-help book if you can. Sure, you can listen to it and just try to memorize facts, or you can have some fun with it. How about as we talk about what Aristotle had to say about what the best way to go about living life is, try to think of how each thing he’s talking about applies to you. It certainly all stands the test of time surprisingly well. I mean, all the general concepts he touches on, you have a direct equivalent to it in your post-modern lifestyle. So, let’s both try to get inside of Aristotle’s head. Have some fun for once, geez.

Plus, I think I read somewhere that by having fun with something you’re studying you end up retaining a lot more of it too. Like, I’m pretty sure that’s why they take preschoolers outside to play hopscotch to learn to count to ten as opposed to just writing it on the blackboard. There’s more of a context there. Not that you guys are like preschoolers, you know. I mean, I’m not saying that. Ah, yes, insulting the listeners, that’s a great way to start a podcast. You know, I may just be the worst podcasting host that has walked the planet since the days of Aristotle.

It all starts when you’re really young—your teens, early 20s. Most people spend their days with no real direction. There’s no definitive end goal in mind. Or if they have one, it may change from day to day. It’s pretty uncertain. They spend most of their time doing recreational things, having fun, gaining experiences, just being young. Whatever plan that they may have doesn’t usually look more than a week down the road. Like, they might make a plan to go to the movies with their friends one day or plan to go ride quads around in the sand dunes on the weekend, but nothing that has much to do with bringing some distant master plan into fruition.

But for the most part, what ends up happening is, the older you get, the more you begin considering your future. You start putting more thought into the decisions you make. Take any normal, everyday action you perform at whatever place in life you are currently, and think of how your method of doing it has evolved over time. For example, younger people might just slump down in a chair—chillin’, you know—whenever they’re sitting around places, while older people might pay attention to their posture, trying to take preventative measures, because the last thing they want to do is walk around in pain in their sunset years. What I’m saying is, you start to do things for a specific purpose.

And although you may still slate aside a couple weeks for a vacation once a year, it’s a far cry from your days of getting drunk, staying up all night, and waking up in your friend’s bathtub. Aristotle thought, if we wanted to achieve a certain level of mastery for living life, we needed a plan for our life. And I’m sure all of us can understand what it’s like to try to get really good at something, and when you’re starting out, making a plan for how you’re going to improve. Plus, I think whenever you’re achieving mastery at anything, the more proficient you get at something, the more purpose you have behind every individual action you take.

Do you know what’s a great example of this distinction that we’re making between an amateur doing something and a true, consummate professional doing something? It happened to me a couple days ago. I was sitting on my computer watching cat videos on YouTube. And I look up at the top righthand corner of the screen, and YouTube is telling me this video is recommended for me by them. You don’t know me YouTube. What is this? “Gordon Ramsey teaches us how to cook scrambled eggs.” Well, obviously you don’t know me very well, YouTube, because for the last year and a half I’ve cooked scrambled eggs every single morning of my life. And if there’s one food that I’m not going to learn anything from Gordon Ramsey about cooking, it’s scrambled eggs.

I completely concede to the fact that he is a far superior chef to me. I mean, this guy has been cooking for years. He could cook anything. He could make a crunch berry soufflé with the best of them. But I know how to cook scrambled eggs. I mean, what am I going to learn from Gordon Ramsey? I got a whole system going. I mean, I got—I crack the eggs into the bowl. I whisk them around. I add the salt and pepper. I get the grass-fed butter down at the bottom of the pan, pour the eggs in. You know, come back 15 minutes later with a fire extinguisher and a shovel.

I watched Gordon Ramsey make these scramble eggs, and I felt like a complete moron. This guy. I mean, firstly, he doesn’t even put butter at the bottom of the pan. He just cracks the eggs into the pan and puts the butter on top of it because it gives it a lovely velvety finish or something. Plus, he doesn’t add salt and pepper to the eggs beforehand because the seasoning starts to break down the eggs, as he said. And I mean, he was like, “It starts to turn it into something quite watery and dreadful.” Look, Gordon Ramsey, my eggs may not have a velvety finish to them like yours, but they certainly weren’t watery and dreadful. At this point of the video, I’m completely offended. He’s attacking my scrambled eggs’ decorum.

Then he says, you should never whisk the egg beforehand like I do. You should whisk it in the pan. Because the last thing you want to do is break it down beforehand. Apparently, that’s bad. And then, to top it off, he’s got some super advanced method of cooking where he just keeps putting the pan on the stove and then taking it off, putting it on the stove, taking it off, constantly stirring it “like a fine risotto, on the heat, off the heat, on the heat, off the heat.” It was insane. My point is this, all these things that I take for granted, all these things I do completely mindlessly while cooking scrambled eggs for no real purpose—Gordon Ramsey, through years of experience and wisdom, he’s achieved a much higher level of mastery at cooking scrambled eggs than I have. And therefore, much better than I am at it.

The same rules apply to becoming better at life or better at living life. You start to develop priorities. You start to find out what’s important to you. And eventually you do almost everything for a purpose. And usually, the purpose you do any one random thing for is to nurture the positive growth of your goals, like whatever your goals are, like being healthy, living a long life, making a lot of money, etc. Eventually we combine all these various things we prioritize as sort of a rulebook for living, a set of values that we live by.

Aristotle calls this a plan. I know, it’s advanced lingo. But that’s not all. He also encourages everyone to make one of these plans. You need one of these. Aristotle was born in 384 BC, 15 years after Socrates had been put on trial and put to death in Athens. But when Aristotle arrived in Athens and enrolled at Plato’s Academy and became a student of Plato’s, he no doubt heard all about Plato’s idol and mentor, Socrates, and his final days as well as his famous saying that the unexamined life is not worth living.

So, in response to this, Aristotle did Socrates one better. He said that an unplanned life is not worth examining. I mean, what point is living a life if we don’t know what we’re trying to do or why or how we’re going to get there? We need a plan. But not just a set of priorities—that’s not a plan. We need to find out how to use these priorities to distinguish certain goals that we want to achieve and figure out how we’re going to achieve them. But even that’s not good enough for Aristotle. Not only should you have a plan, but you should have his plan, the plan. To Aristotle, there’s only one fully correct plan for life. So, if you don’t follow it, then you may be happy, but not as happy as you could be.

Now, the idea of there being one single, ultimate plan that every human has to follow is a relatively foreign idea for modern times, and for good reason. Like, to us, it seems like a waste of time to agonize over what the ultimate goal of life is because it’s obviously a glaring and important question that all of us ask at some point, right? And if there was a definite right answer, we probably would have figured it out a long time ago, probably thousands of years ago. So, we end up just applying our own meaning to our life and deeming it to be the best for us. But when we use terms like what is the best end goal to life, we’re implying that there are better and worse end goals. But what makes them better or worse? What metric are we using to determine what is better?

Aristotle clearly thought a lot about this concept. Here’s a quote from one of his dialogues when he’s talking about this complete inevitability of different humans wanting different things sort of setting the stage for his ideas that were to come later. “That wish is for the end has already been stated; some think it is for the good, others for the apparent good. Now those who say that the good is the object of wish must admit in consequence that that which the man who does not choose aright wishes for is not an object of wish (for if it is to be so, it must also be good; but it was bad); while those who say the apparent good is the object of wish must admit that there is no natural object of wish, but only what seems good to each man. Now different things appear good to different people, and, if it so happens, even contrary things.”

If one person deems the purpose of life to be the pursuit of knowledge and a completely different person thinks the purpose of life is finding a way to use your brain as little as possible, how can these two completely opposite world views have the same end goal? Well, Aristotle thought they did if only you analyze them a little deeper. Aristotle thought the ultimate end goal of life—what we should all shoot for—is living well.

Now, real quickly, let’s establish a few things about living life. There are few things we do solely for the sake of staying alive, like eating, drinking, exercising—things like that, things that keep us alive. There are a whole set of other things we do because we think that if we do them, we’ll be able to make living life easier or better in some way.

For example, you could choose to educate yourself. Now, it’s not necessary to stay alive, but we think that by expanding our mind and knowing a variety about a bunch of different subjects, we can use that knowledge to live a better life, not to mention the satisfaction we get from constantly growing as people. We can think of these two different types of things as things that we do just to live and things that we do to live well. And we can think of both of them as end goals that we hope to achieve that are in line with the priorities we developed earlier.

In fact, we could even break it down further. You only really need one of these things, right? Living well. Because you can’t live well if you aren’t alive. So, things we do just to stay alive, really, are all requisites on our path to achieving the goal of living well. Aristotle talks about how everything we do is either an end or a means to an end. We either do something for the sake of getting something else, or we do something solely for its own sake.

Now, if living well is one of our goals in life, is there anything we want after that? Like, are we living well for the sake of achieving some further goal? Aristotle didn’t think so. He thinks we live well just for the sake of living well. Therefore, living well, to Aristotle, is the ultimate end goal of life. Here’s Aristotle talking about the idea of navigating these means that will ultimately get us to the end goal of life. This is from the Nicomachean Ethics, book three, part three.

“We deliberate not about ends but about means. For a doctor does not deliberate whether he shall heal, nor an orator whether he shall persuade, nor a statesman whether he shall produce law and order, nor does anyone else deliberate about his end. They assume the end and consider how and by what means it is to be attained; and if it seems to be produced by several means they consider by which it is most easily and best produced, while if it is achieved by only one they consider how it will be achieved by this and by what means this will be achieved, till they come to the first cause, which in the order of discovery is last.”

Aristotle thinks there are a lot of things as humans that we desire in this world or things that we think are good. Like we said in our earlier example, one person may say the pursuit of knowledge is the best thing. One person may say the pursuit of using your brain as little as possible is the best thing. And all these things that we think are good are really just our own little personalized path we forged that we’re taking with all the paths eventually arriving at a single, final destination which is what you actually want—living well.

Modern translations of Aristotle’s term for living well say the best translation for what he’s talking about is our modern-day concept of “happiness.” But just to be clear, I’ve seen it translated in a few sources as “success” and a few sources as “flourishing” as well. But for our purposes here today, living well is happiness. Now, happiness is what we all seek whether it’s through pursuing knowledge or not pursuing knowledge. Both of these people still want happiness. The difference is what brings them happiness.

Aristotle didn’t just think this was the case; he thought that it was self-evident that this was the ultimate end goal of life. Because when you ask someone why they want happiness, they can never really give you an answer. So, they’re obviously not doing it for the sake of getting something else. I mean, the only way you could really say that you wanted happiness for a reason is if happiness was a requisite for achieving some other ultimate goal. But the way Aristotle saw it, there was no such thing. Happiness or living well was the ultimate goal.

Now, as I was saying before, what brings us happiness varies from person to person. That shouldn’t come as a surprise. I mean, for the most part, we experience happiness when we get what we want. So, because one person might be made happy by pursuing knowledge and someone else might be made miserable by pursuing knowledge, there’s no cookie cutter recipe for happiness, right? So, Aristotle thought that even though our paths to happiness were so astronomically different, if you distill it down enough, we really all want the same things too.

And before we continue, real quick, it’s important to know that Aristotle thought that the things we think of as good are the same as the things we think of as desirable. The two terms were completely synonymous to him. Aristotle thought that as humans we’re all individuals. We all have individual upbringings, individual experiences, and individual perspectives. And it’s based on these experiences that we determine what is desirable to us. This is how you can explain the difference between someone who thinks it’s desirable to pursue knowledge or not to pursue knowledge or to be the greatest tennis player in the world or to strap dynamite to yourself and glorify God. All of these things are based on things we’ve deemed to be desirable because of our individual backgrounds.

But even if most of these desires differ from person to person, as human beings, we all have similar desires too, like being able to eat or drink or sleep, etc. On that same note, we all desire things that we don’t actually need to stay alive too. I mean, we desire to have the double bacon cheeseburger, but we don’t need it. We desire to get that big promotion or to date a supermodel, but we don’t need it. We think that if we had these things, they would be good for us and enrich our lives, so we desire them. Hence Aristotle’s idea that if we see something as desirable, we see it as good.

But just like in the case of the double bacon cheeseburger—which, by the way, is also my favorite Nancy Drew Book, The Case of the Double Bacon Cheeseburger—what we desire and what we see as good is not actually good for us. The double bacon cheeseburger is a good example of how easily something can seem like it’s a good idea for us at a particular time or place, but at a later time and place it may seem completely terrible for us. And this dynamic applies to most things, even your worldview. Like, if the guy that relentlessly pursues never using his brain or learning anything as the most desirable thing one day—let’s just say some other day he’s trying to memorize the ingredients of different alcoholic drinks for his bartender’s exam. In that case, pursuing knowledge ends up being really good to him.

Aristotle uses this fact to mark a distinction between things we think are desirable that may vary from time to time and things that we think are desirable that never vary, like things we need to survive. This is another way of marking the contrast between two different types of desires that I’m sure we’re more familiar with: wants and needs. Both are things that we desire, but they’re not the same thing.

So, Aristotle referred to these things as either acquired desires—or wants, for us—desires we’ve acquired based on our experiences during our lives, and natural desires—or needs, for us—which are desires we were born with because we’re human and all humans have them regardless of background. He says that the only things that are really good for you are the things that fulfill your natural desires, because these things we need whether we’re conscious of the need or not. Whereas everything else you desire falls into the acquired desires category, and it only appears to be good at the time.

Aristotle applies this idea across several areas of his philosophy. And he’s actually addressing issues of metaphysics when he says the content of this next quote. But out of all of his work, I think this is the most succinct encapsulation of his thoughts on real versus apparent goods. And I think he just says it best here. “The primary objects of desire and of thought are the same. For the apparent good is the object of appetite, and the real good is the primary object of rational wish. But desire is consequent on opinion rather than opinion on desire; for the thinking is the starting point.”

The one correct ultimate end goal or plan for living well, the plan that brings us happiness, is a plan that includes us attaining all the things that are actually good for us to have—those natural desires. So, because all of these natural desires we have are the same for everyone, because we’re all human and share the same natural desires of things like food or shelter or water, what is truly good for one person is actually truly good for everyone. That’s why Aristotle says happiness is the same in the case of all human beings. And that’s why he refers to all these things that fulfill our natural desires as “real goods.” Now, remember that term, “real goods.” It’s really important for what’s coming up.

We all have our own unique, individual paths that we take to try to acquire all these real goods. Donald Trump’s plan to secure things like food, clothing, and shelter is obviously much different than a panhandling homeless guy’s plan to acquire these things. And what Aristotle would say is that these differences definitely make some plans better than others. But remember, Aristotle thought there was one ultimate plan that was the best you could do. It's one that involves getting every real good in the right order and quantity while simultaneously making it possible for us to seek the things we want but don’t necessarily need that will enrich our lives.

So, if we want to achieve true happiness by using Aristotle’s plan, it seems pretty important to figure out what all these real goods are, right? I mean, if the main thing we need to be happy in Aristotle’s eyes are all these real goods that he’s talking about, seems like we should at least have a list of them. Seems like we should have them laminated on our wall or something.

Aristotle separates these real goods down into a few different parts. He says human beings are animals with the unique ability to think and reason. Because we’re animals with a machine-like body that needs maintenance all the time, some of these real goods help us with our bodily needs. These bodily goods, as they’re called, are made up of vigor, vitality, health, and sensual pleasures. So, Aristotle says that even though we go about getting these things in a variety of different ways, we not only share all these desires with every other human; we actually share all these desires with every other animal in the animal kingdom, because all animals avoid pain and seek pleasure as well as vigor, vitality, and health.

Now, if living well is the ultimate end goal, then vigor, vitality, and health are three requisites on that road to living well. They’re means to an end. But to achieve even one of those three is a goal in itself. So, there are requisites for achieving any one of them too. To have vigor, vitality, and health, you need five things as Aristotle saw it: food, drink, clothing, sleep, and shelter.

Now, when you break vigor, vitality, and health down into these five tangible or easily identifiable things, it’s easy to see how they’re extremely interrelated. Like, it doesn’t matter how much food or drink you have; you can’t be healthy if you don’t sleep. And it really doesn’t matter how much sleep you have; you aren’t going to have much vigor at the end of the day if you’re walking around naked with no home to go to.

So, because it makes sense, and seemingly to make it easier for people like us studying him 2,500 years later, what Aristotle does is group all of these external things that we need to achieve bodily goods—he groups them all together and calls them external goods or wealth. Now, I realize I could have just said wealth was a requisite for living well, but that definitely would have been misleading. Our definition of wealth is not the same as Aristotle’s. I wasn’t trying to waste your time. I mean, if I had just said “wealth,” you guys would be thinking of that generic burlap sack with the dollar sign on it that bank robbers have in the cartoons. Moving on.

When I think about Aristotle and these needs that correspond with goals that we need to achieve on our path to happiness, it may be kind of dumb, but I honestly remember it by thinking of the quote, “Early to be and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise.” I’m sure we’ve all heard our grandma tell us that 1,500 times. But just in case it helps you remember like it helps me remember, I’d just like to explain it real quick.

The “early to bed and early to rise” part reminds me of the five external goods, because I think of sleep. And living in the time that I do, when I think of sleep, I think of being in my house with my sleeping attire on, my sleeping cap. I think about my warm glass of milk which symbolizes food. It reminds me of the other four external goods as well as sleep. And then the “makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise” part reminds me of the different goals that harnessing those external goods is going to give me. Healthy reminds me of the vigor, vitality, and health. Wealthy reminds me of the five external goods that are also known as wealth. And the wise part represents the next part we’re going to talk about, because what we’ve talked about so far isn’t all you need just to be happy.

Remember, he says human beings are animals with the unique ability to think and reason. So, because we have this unique ability to think and reason, there are some real goods that we need to supplement and nurture our ability to think and reason. Instead of bodily goods or external goods, he grouped these into the “goods of the soul.”

Now remember, at the time of Aristotle, this phenomenon known as conscious thought wasn’t connected to the brain yet. They thought that humans have a soul that controls our ability to think and reason—I mean, among doing a bunch of other things that are pretty funny. But when it comes to the goods of the soul, Aristotle thought to be truly happy we need to pursue a certain amount of knowledge. I mean, the way he saw it, we’re thinking, curious, learning creatures by nature. And it just seems like, without acquiring knowledge of some kind, something would be lacking.

So, another one of these goods of the soul is the desire to be loved or the desire for friendship. We are social creatures, just like we talked about in the first episode of Philosophize This! You lock a guy in solitary confinement for six months, he goes absolutely insane. We need interaction with other humans. And even Aristotle realized this. He thought that our desire to be respected for our favorable characteristics, like our skill at one particular thing or our, you know, refined 6-pack abs—whatever we have, the desire we have to be respected for those things is actually really closely related to being loved.

Because of this, he includes the real goods of self-esteem and honor as part of the goods of the soul. But he makes sure to note that all forms of honor are not created equal. It needs to be honor that’s gained for a legitimate reason. Like, you can’t just pretend to be a smart guy hanging around a bunch of dumb people and be honored as though you’re a great thinker of your time.

One exclusively modern example of what Aristotle is talking about would be the type of person that exists in today’s world that sits around constantly poised with their iPhone in a leather holster just waiting to pull it out and record anything out of the ordinary that happens to them in their daily travels—you know, just praying that the video will somehow make them internet famous for doing absolutely nothing. It seems that, for a contingent of people in today’s world, fame is the most desirable end goal regardless of how they achieve it or whether it’s based on anything of substance. This type of person, in Aristotle’s eyes, should consider the honor they seek as a vice not as a real good.

Aristotle realized that all these real goods are end goals in themselves. And when you’re creating a road map for eventually arriving at living well and achieving happiness, it can be unclear as to how you even get to these end goals so that you can then start your path to the ultimate end goal of living well. So, Aristotle developed a way for us to consistently make correct decisions too.

Now, have you ever had a bad habit before? Have you ever eaten something while driving your car around, and then when you get to where you’re going, you just leave the trash sitting in your car? You’re just like, eh, you know, I’ll get it next time. But you don’t. And then the next time you leave trash in your car it just piles up over and over again until your passenger seat looks like a yard sale. If you had a time-lapse camera videotaping your passenger seat, it would be really obvious to you that it was just one bad habitual decision being made over and over. It takes conscious effort to stop a bad habit no matter what it is.

Aristotle knew we were habitual creatures. When you have a bad habit, to stop doing it, you’re really just training your mind in the direction of a more productive behavioral habit. It helps to have your mind on autopilot sometimes. But he knew this wasn’t just restricted to negative habits. Positive behaviors can be worked on too—behaviors that can end up making your life better and leading to the real goods that we just talked about.

And it could even be something as simple as eating in your car and not leaving the trash on the passenger’s seat. If you see the banana peel on your seat, just take the initiative and throw it away. Because each time you do it, you know, the next time you’re staring down the banana peel in your car and trying to find an excuse to leave it there, if you do it, it’s slightly easier to just throw it away the next time. And if you leave it there, you’re slightly weaker, and it’s slightly more difficult to throw it away the next time.

But Aristotle didn’t restrict this just to things like banana peels. I mean, to clarify, he never said anything about banana peels. That’s my dumb example. He thought to live well and to be happy we have to make habits out of virtuous behavior so that it comes as second nature to us eventually. And it’s not even a decision.

One example of this would be like if you’re on a diet. You know you’re not supposed to eat at McDonald’s. You know you’re supposed to march into the woods and just chew on some tree bark, right? And each time you’re on your lunch break and you see the golden arches in the distance, and you think, “Man, I’m not supposed to get fast food. But, I mean, maybe I’ll just get like a strawberry milkshake. I mean, that has fruit in it, right? That’s healthy,” and you pull into the McDonald’s drive-thru and concede to those impulses—the more you let that happen, the easier it is for you to do it the next day.

Aristotle called these sorts of bad habits “vices” and thought that if you made a habit of acting virtuously, eventually it would be such an engrained habit that it wouldn’t take any effort at all to act virtuously. Aristotle thought this applies to all virtuous behavior and that by making it a habit to act virtuously, we’ll be naturally moving on the path to achieving these goals of things like honor or wealth or any of the other real goods that are requisites to living well.

He thought that we needed virtuous behavior. And it makes sense. McDonald’s is a food. Food is one of the five external goods. But without virtuous habits telling us what type of food to eat or how much of it to eat or what time to eat it, we could technically stuff ourselves so full that we die. So, although he didn’t give the McDonald’s example, he thought the same dynamic applies to most decisions in life.

Controlling yourself to not eat at McDonald’s and stick to your diet is an example of Aristotle’s virtue of temperance. Now, the dictionary defines temperance as moderation. And it’s easy to see that we run into most of our problems as humans—be it health-wise or with relationships or whatever—is when we do things in excess. Moderation or temperance is a virtue. Temperance was one of two primary moral virtues Aristotle wrote about. The other one was courage.

Now, if you’re like me, you hear the word “courage,” and you think of a soldier charging into battle or a little kid going on a scary roller coaster. But Aristotle thought of courage a little more broadly than that. He thought that doing things that cause us temporary discomfort or pain to ultimately achieve some higher good is just another form of courage.

For example, going to the gym and pushing yourself to the next level would be courage to Aristotle. Challenging your brain or learning—like, have you ever read a book that’s just challenging? Like, your stomach hurts when you’re reading it, it’s so challenging. And you just want to stop and watch TV or something instead. Achieving mastery at anything is hard work. And Aristotle called this courage.

Both temperance and courage involve using our ability to reason to distinguish between things that just look like they’re good for us and things that are actually good for us. These were the two primary virtues that Aristotle laid out in his writing. And then he laid out several other more minor ones but qualified them all, as well as the real goods we’re pursuing by acting virtuously, with the idea that achieving them was based at least in some cases around luck.

Luck plays a significant role in determining whether you ever have the chance of living well. You know, if there’s a mass drought or a mass famine, you didn’t do anything wrong to make that happen. It was just a bad roll of the dice that made you unable to get the external goods of food and drink. Sometimes this applies to the goods of the soul too. I mean, to acquire a certain amount or kind of knowledge, it may just come down to whether you were lucky enough to have a teacher that could relay it to you effectively or were lucky enough to be born into a good enough neighborhood. Not having that isn’t necessarily your fault. And how about diseases like cancer? I mean, there are many examples of how this could be the case.

So, Aristotle makes a case for why acting in a virtuous way is not good enough on its own but acting virtuously may ultimately put you in a lot more favorable circumstances that allow luck to go your way. But luck definitely plays a role.

But I don’t want to misrepresent what Aristotle talked about as luck. I mean, it’s not something that solely squanders virtuous behavior. It’s not just something that takes someone who lives a perfectly moral life and starves them to death. I mean, it doesn’t just make the outcomes of good actions worse. It can also make people who are not virtuous temporarily happier—like, I mean, if a criminal wins the lottery or something or, I mean, it could even make bad decisions worse.

For example, imagine if there are two people going through that McDonald’s drive-thru we were talking about earlier. Both of them decide to eat their McChicken sandwiches on the way home. And for the sake of this example, imagine that they’re really bad at eating and driving, like, cartoonishly bad at eating and driving, like holding the chicken sandwich in front of their face so they can’t see the road. One of them swerves off the road and crashes into a tree, okay? The other one swerves off the road and crashes into a tree, but there happened to be a mother walking with her baby in a stroller in between them and the tree. And they kill both of them. Both drivers have committed the exact same act of negligence. But because of bad luck, one of them has a completely different life than the other moving forward.

Now, this is an extreme example, but you guys can see how on a smaller scale the same dynamic can exist with non-virtuous behavior. Plus, as a society, we would view justice on these two scenarios completely differently, which brings me to the last thing Aristotle points out as things we need to make us happy, justice.

We can’t pursue living well alone, right? We need other people and social interaction. We laid that out earlier. And justice is a virtue that requires a balancing of the scales between two parties during these social interactions. So, Aristotle breaks down justice into two types: distributive justice which, simply put, has to do with the elements of whatever system of government you were born into. Like, if you’re born into a life of slavery or a society with tons of unjust laws, it becomes really hard to live well. The other kind of justice is corrective justice, which involves correcting unfair distribution, like when individuals make non-virtuous decisions and don’t exercise temperance, taking more than what they need at the jeopardy of others.

So, as you can probably see, it starts to get difficult to know what the correct thing to do is when trying to incentivize human progress with things like capitalism. But Aristotle makes it very clear that we can’t just be happy simply by being virtuous people. We need to exercise these virtues. You may understand the idea of temperance and have the ability to use temperance if you were given a chance to. But if you don’t actually practice it, you’re never going to be happy. Aristotle says that the best athletes in the world only win at the Olympic games if they actually compete. He compares the athletes in his example to people that have the ability to act virtuously and want to be happy.

A great quote by Aristotle that I use on a consistent basis that really sums up a lot of his ideas for living a good life is, “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.” It really is an inspirational quote, at least for me. I mean, it puts our egos into context. It really doesn’t matter what you’ve done in the past. Like, if you have a long list of accomplishments and successes but you spend every day now doing nothing, making a bunch of bad decisions, who are you exactly? Are you the successes that you’ve had in the past, or are you the person that you are today?

And on that same note, on the other hand, you could have messed up every single day before today. You could have been the type of person that just leaves trash on the passenger seat of their car all the time. But if for two weeks you take that trash and put it in the trash can, what kind of person are you now, right? I mean, we’ve all heard the stories about the people that smoke cigarettes for 30 years and then one day decide they’re just never going to touch them again. And I realize it doesn’t usually work that way. But if you looked at those people even one minute after they had made that decision to never smoke again, do we consider them a smoker? Do we consider them 60 seconds sober, something like that?

Regardless, Aristotle’s quote is empowering. It really makes you think about who you are not from the standpoint of what you say your values are but what you actually do consistently every day.

A long time ago I read a book on the power of self-confidence. It was a great, great time in my life. And in the book they ask you to do an exercise that’s really eye-opening when it comes to determining what kind of person you actually are. And I still try to do this exercise at least once a month. Philosophize this: if you knew you were going to die tonight and you had to write your own obituary that would appear in the newspaper the next day, what would you write? What would your actions portray as your true values? And how did you make the people around you feel?