Crisis & Opportunity

In Search of The Good Life

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IN THE SPRING of 2017, Yale University began offering a class called “Psychology and the Good Life.” Conceived by professor Laurie Santos, the course was an attempt to address concerns over the growing mental health crisis among undergraduates. Dr. Santos believed that a major cause of this epidemic was that students had been forced to deprioritize their personal happiness and well-being in order to jump through all the hoops required to obtain admission at such a prestigious school. By utilizing the latest insights of modern science and cognitive theory, she hoped to reprogram her students mindsets to help foster their personal pursuits of happiness.

The response was overwhelming. Within a week of registration opening, nearly a quarter of the undergraduate population had signed up, and it now stands as the most popular class in the school’s 300-plus-year history. 

The lecture-based curriculum centered mainly on what is known as “positive psychology” (the study of which character traits lead to human flourishing) and on behavioral change (exchanging bad habits that undermine this flourishing for good ones that reinforce it). Topics included “Misconceptions about happiness,” “Why our expectations are so bad,” “How we can overcome our biases,” and “Stuff that really makes us happy.” The students were given quizzes and exams to test them on their grasp of these new life skills and were asked to complete weekly “rewirement” challenges. The course then culminated in a final “Hack Yo’ Self Project” where the students were asked to put the theories they had learned into practice. 

The course is now offered free online under the title “The Science of Well-Being” and has been taken nearly 5 million times. It is available in 21 languages, takes three weeks to complete, and claims to equip participants with the skills of “gratitude, happiness, meditation, and savoring.” The problem, as Dr. Santos sees it, is the things that young people are taught to value today—a prestigious internship or good-paying job, a big house, fancy cars, and nice clothes—are not what actually lead to true satisfaction. As she explained to the New York Times, “Scientists didn’t realize this in the same way 10 or so years ago, that our intuitions about what will make us happy, like winning the lottery and getting a good grade—are totally wrong.” 

The question this would seem to beg is: Where did students learn to value such things? Was it from their parents, or from former teachers; from our culture, or, as Santos seems to suggest, from scientists? Who—or what—convinced them that the “good life” is primarily obtained through social achievement, through winning stuff and owning stuff, through being recognized by others as superior through accolades and awards?

“ON THE BASIS of the lives they lead,” Aristotle posited 2400 years ago in his Nicomachean Ethics, “the majority seem, not unreasonably, to suppose that the good and happiness are pleasure. Hence they are content with a life devoted to mere enjoyment … a life that belongs to fatted cattle.” (1095b14) The opinions of the average ancient Athenian citizen, it would seem, did not differ much from the average Ivy league American today, both believing that material comfort and pleasure would bring them happiness. But where did the majority of Athenians learn to value such things? Is it an inherent feature of our shared democratic regime; or perhaps an innate part of human nature?

Our word “ethics” comes from the ancient Greek ethos meaning “character” or “habit.” Our character, it was held, is born out of and borne by the habits we embody. The Nicomachean Ethics, one could say (although I would not), was the first work of “positive psychology”: a systematic study of what leads to human flourishing. Like Dr. Santos, Aristotle too understood that “characteristics arise as a result of the activities akin to them. Hence we must make our pursuits be of a certain quality, for our character corresponds to the differences among them.” (1103b20) How we choose to spend our time—on what and with whom—is the foundation of a good life, they concur. And yet Dr. Santos claims that not even twenty years ago, scientists apparently had no idea about any of this. How had it come to be that those considered our wisest men today mistook the life of the cow for human happiness?

Now I don’t quite believe that Santos’ statement is true—that scientists ever saw winning the lottery or getting a good grade as the peak of happiness. However, I am not sure which scenario is worse: that they may have actually held such an opinion; or that a superstar Ivy league professor believes they held such an opinion—and moreover, that the ancient wisdom she reiterates was some sort of cutting-edge discovery. 

It is clear to just about everyone today except for the rankest ideologue that something has gone terribly wrong in our society and that something needs to be done to address it. As one of the students interviewed by the Times revealed, “In reality, a lot of us are anxious, stressed, unhappy, numb.” But does anyone really believe that a few simple “lifehacks” electronically transmitted over the course of three weeks can be an adequate antidote for such a profound crisis?

It seems to me that such a wonder drug solution instead reinforces the very habits that led to our current degraded condition. The fact that our most accomplished and promising young people somehow share the same opinions about the meaning of life as the average man-on-the-street in the 4th century BC seems telling. Their entire formative years were spent in a mindless slog in the hopes of becoming a chosen one at one of our country's august bastions of “higher learning.” But what do they really learn from this experience?

OUR WORD FOR “school,” like “ethics,” is also derived from the Greek: scholē meaning “leisure” or that which one does with their free time. Scholē was the activity engaged in when not working, warring, or politicking—which in its highest form consisted mainly of philosophic contemplation and discussion. School today is an activity one is forced to suffer through in preparation for work, war, or politics; and leisure has become synonymous with distracted inactivity. 

“Happiness,” Aristotle proposes in his conclusion to the Ethics, “is held to reside in scholē; for we are occupied or are not-at-leisure [ascholē] so that we may be at leisure, and we wage war so that we may be at peace.” (1177b4) Leisured learning was once thought to be the path to the highest form of human happiness—in fact, something nearly divine. Though pleasant, it was not pleasurable in the way of food, comfort, entertainment, and sex, but in the sense that higher learning once held: a good that transcends and uplifts. Thus ancient wise men saw leisure not as a means of recreation, but as re-creation—a renewal at the deepest level of our beings.

The Koinos Project is an attempt to recover this forgotten conception of scholē by exploring what we’ve gained and what we’ve lost as we have moved away from these older understandings and activities. Exactly what it is we are missing is hard to say, but we believe it to be something of immeasurable worth; and further, that which lies at the heart of the crisis affecting not just our overachieving youths, but our entire society. There is, of course, no simple return to some lost Arcadian paradise—history moves in only one direction. But the past can—and should—inform the future.

We invite you to join us in this journey.