Why Chasing Goals Never Makes You Happy: Aristotle on the Good Life

Apr 3

8 min read

Updated: Sep 3

Life as a constant chase after goals and targets dominates the way we live today. Life as

the famous rat race that never ends, from school to the next project at work, always laboring for the sake of something more that is still to come. We tell ourselves that once we land the job, once we sort out our finances, once the partner or the house or the recognition arrives, then, yes, then we will finally be happy. And so we go, from goal to goal, staking our happiness on what is always yet to come.

The trouble with this approach is that those who have actually reached those goals know firsthand that things did not work out as promised, or at least not entirely. The longed-for fulfillment, if it arrives at all, lasts only a moment before the sense of lack settles back in, giving rise to a new goal that now seems to be the one we really need. This gap between what we expected to feel, namely fulfillment or happiness, and what we actually feel is not necessarily bad luck or a personal failing. In many cases, that sense of emptiness is a sign that we have misunderstood our relationship with happiness, and that this is why we keep looking for it where it cannot be found.

What We're Sold as Happiness

What does it mean to be happy? We almost always picture the same thing: a pleasant state, feeling good, having what we want, lacking nothing, having things go our way. It is an image that quietly governs how we live and steers what we chase after and what we avoid. It is everywhere, and yet we rarely stop to reflect on what it actually means, or at least on what it means for us. This picture of happiness is essentially a matter of well-being, one heavily promoted by marketing and by what circulates on social media. Accumulating pleasurable experiences, dodging discomfort, and surrounding ourselves with whatever makes us feel good. It is not that this view is wrong, far from it. On the contrary, there is a great deal of truth in it. The problem is how much it leaves out.

It is entirely normal and reasonable that we should all prefer pleasure to pain, admiration to contempt. But thinking of happiness as a string of fleeting states that fade the moment we reach them can, in the long run, turn life into an endless source of dissatisfaction. When we are ill, we believe happiness lies in health; when money is short, we believe it lies in wealth; when we feel alone, in company. In other words, we keep changing our minds about what happiness is depending on what we happen to lack at any given moment. It is an idea of happiness defined by lack, by what is missing, and one that, once obtained, simply installs some new thing we now lack. Understanding happiness as whatever we currently do without reveals that we are confusing happiness with its conditions, that is, with what allows us to live well but is not yet living well itself. For the conditions that make an activity possible are very different from the activity we carry out thanks to them. Having everything you need to play tennis is one thing; the act of playing tennis well is quite another. Owning a guitar is one thing; being able to play it well is something else entirely.

Happiness as a Way of Living, and Virtue. Aristotle.

Aristotle from Raphael's School of Athens

To untangle this vital misunderstanding, it is worth recovering a very old intuition, and

among the Greeks who thought it through, the view most worth rescuing is undoubtedly Aristotle's. Happiness, as he saw it, is not a feeling or a lucky moment, nor is it acquiring the means to do whatever one pleases. For him, happiness is a way of living that sustains itself over time. It is an activity, and as such it is not something that merely happens to us, something that comes our way, but something we do. Aristotle understood happiness as a way of living well, in much the way a good guitarist plays the guitar well. Once the necessary means are in place, the good guitarist carries out the activity itself, which is to play the guitar well, in the right way. Aristotle thinks of happiness by analogy: once the basic means are in place, it falls to the person, as a rational being, to “play life well,” that is, to carry out the activity of living in the right way.

If happiness is an activity, a way or form of living well, then what does it consist of? In a nutshell, in knowing how to carry out each action virtuously, which over time and through habit builds the character needed to be happy. For Aristotle, happiness consists chiefly in performing actions by weighing correctly between our own capacities and what the situation demands. Because that is what virtue is for him: acting by finding the mean between what I can do and what I ought to do, between my abilities and what the context asks of me.

These days the word virtue tends to conjure up rigid moralizing or a list of prohibitions, but for Aristotle it is nothing of the sort. Virtue, in its deepest sense, is simply what makes something perform its function well. From this perspective, we can say that a knife has a virtue, namely cutting well. The human being has a virtue too, and it is knowing how to live rightly in accordance with our rationality. Rationality is what is properly our own, what sets us apart from other beings, and knowing how to use this faculty well is our proper function. We call happy the person who has learned to use their rationality correctly, which amounts to becoming virtuous.

Pierre August Renoir. Luncheon of the Boating Party

Virtue, according to Aristotle, is acting in accordance with the mean between two vices, one of excess and one of deficiency. The simplest example is courage: it is acting in the right way in the face of fear, feeling it in the right measure according to what the situation asks of us. The person who has great capacities and fails to act because they are afraid is a coward. The person with few capacities who acts recklessly is rash. But the one who acts amid fear in keeping with what they are able to do, that is the courageous person. This structure of virtue, moreover, serves to think through many kinds of action, including, for instance, even enjoyment. There is such a thing as enjoying too little (the embittered person) and enjoying too much (the reckless partygoer), but the one who manages to enjoy things fittingly, according to the situation, that person is virtuous too.

The Weight of Circumstances

Circumstances do matter, and to deny it would be a cruelty dressed up as wisdom. Health, enough money, relationships, a minimum of security, all of it counts, not because it is happiness itself, but because these are the conditions that make a good life possible. They are like the guitar and the strings that allow the good guitarist to play well. They are not the playing itself, but they are what makes playing well possible. It is far harder, if not impossible, to practice generosity in utter destitution, or to cultivate serenity in the midst of constant pain, or to develop one's character when all one's energy goes into surviving. Just as it is far harder to play the guitar well when the instrument is in poor shape and the strings are about to snap.

What is striking and refreshing about this 2500-year-old perspective is the balance it proposes, one that falls into neither of the two usual extremes. It does not say, as the more naive version does, that happiness can be bought with material well-being, as though having were the same as living well. But neither does it say, as a certain idealism does, that external conditions make no difference and that one can be perfectly happy in any situation, however terrible. It acknowledges that adversity strikes and that there are circumstances in which no one can fully flourish. And yet it holds to something that consoles without deceiving: even in misfortune, there is something that does not depend on luck, and that is the way one conducts oneself, the manner in which one meets what befalls them. That part, the part most our own, not even the worst fortune can take from us completely.

What This Means for Life Today. Avoiding Existential Vacuums

All of this, which might sound like ancient philosophy, describes the malaise of our own age with unsettling precision. We live obsessed with optimizing life, with accumulating experiences, with performing more and feeling better, surrounded by tools and advice for maximizing well-being the way one maximizes an investment. And yet, amid such an abundance of resources for being happy, we produce an enormous amount of emptiness, of anxiety, of people who have everything supposed to make them happy and are not. That widespread dissatisfaction, so characteristic of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, is no mystery and no new disease. It is, in large part, the symptom of having confused acquiring means with living well, of having placed happiness in the means rather than in the way they are used.

If this old reflection is right, then the question that truly matters is not “what do I lack in order to be happy?” but a rather more uncomfortable and more fruitful one: “how am I living?” The first keeps us running after the next thing, collecting swallows while we wait for a summer that never comes. The second returns us to the present, to the character we are forming, to the kind of person we are being in our everyday lives. It is a shift easy to state and hard to sustain, because it runs against almost everything the culture keeps repeating, but it is also profoundly liberating, because it places the good life back in our own hands instead of leaving it hanging on a future that may never arrive.

Happiness as an activity

Perhaps this is the most uncomfortable and at the same time most hopeful lesson of this way of thinking about happiness. Happiness is not a prize handed over at the end of the effort, nor a place one reaches and settles into for good. It is a task, something built day by day in the concrete way we live, in the small things we do and in the manner in which we do them, in the character we are shaping through are actions almost without noticing. It is not achieved all at once. It is exercised and cultivated until it becomes habit, until we simply play the guitar well, without thinking about each chord or about the guitar at all. But first we need to practice, and practice every day, until we become proficient at playing life by cultivating how we do, that is, in accordance with our capacities while aiming to improve. This perspective applies when helping others, when bettering ourselves, when courage or calmness is required, when having to solve any problem, or even when it comes to having fun. Do it, and try to do it well by understanding your capacities and what the context demands of you. Don’t demand too much of yourself, but neither too little. Find your sweet spot, the one that corresponds to your capacities and what the context requires.

And precisely because it is a task, and not a stroke of luck, it is something we can work on, something that admits of being thought through, revised, redirected. We are not condemned to chase forever what our age tells us we ought to want. These are questions that are not answered once and for all, nor entirely on our own, and that are often thought through better in company, with calm and with method. But they are, perhaps, the only questions truly worth asking. They are questions found in examining who (and how) we are and the life we lead. And that answer, the concrete one, your own, is in no book.

I publish weekly articles on Philosophy and Psychology. To get notifications subscribe here.

If these questions resonate with you, my work in philosophical counseling and existential analysis offers a space for dialogue to think through how you are living and what life you want to build. If you would like to take that step, I invite you to get in touch.