COMPANION NOTES: hunger and the pursuit of happiness

Reflections on philosophers, happy hormones and hungry ghosts. Plus thoughts on simple pleasures, being more like sky, and some journaling prompts for you.

It seems that not even the philosophers, ancient or modern, are able to define what happiness is, but a lot of them try. Is it all in the mind? a feeling of pleasure? a state of contentment? Many come back to Aristotle who asserted that to pursue a life of virtue would lead to eudaimonia (εὐδαιμονίᾱ), a Greek word that better renders as an holistic flourishing than the more subjective state of feeling good.

Let’s take a look at different ways happiness might be defined.