I've been meaning to write something for about six/seven months now. Initially it was about being grateful for Eliquis, and the only thing I could think of was the title: "Thank God for Eliquis." I knew what I was going to write: about how grateful I feel to be a resident physician here, and how much of that gratitude is tied up in healthcare itself. I wanted to write about the healthcare system specifically, and how it's instilled values and traits in me that I didn't expect. I knew, in theory, that working in healthcare would make me more grateful, more patient, more courteous, kinder, more empathetic. I thought those were just platitudes. But I've felt them happening to me in real time, and I was going to write about that.
Then something happened. I got married. My perspective started evolving, shifting, coming to grips with a bigger picture. At that point, it stopped being just about work being fulfilling. There was more to it.
And so the word eudaimonia started hovering in my brain, and "Thank God for Eliquis" quietly became "The Perils of Eudaimonia." I might still write "Thank God for Eliquis" at some point, it may deserve its own entry. But for now, this is the one.
Everybody talks about the journey mattering more than the destination. In our pursuit of philosophical meaning behind hardship, we usually end up ignoring the opposite question: what happens when the destination matters more than the journey? What do you do once you actually arrive, because sometimes, after a long enough road, you do arrive.
There's a particular risk hiding in that arrival. You spend years on something, a journey that's sometimes fun, sometimes hard, sometimes both, and then you're there. You're at what one might dare call eudaimonia. And you find yourself, quite literally, in a desi grocery store in a foreign country, pushing a cart down the aisle behind your wife while she picks out a strawberry Rio biscuit. You don't even like artificial strawberry flavor, you've always been more of a Tuck than a Rio kind of person, but later, when she shows you how she eats it, in this particular way of cleaning up the cream from one wafer to another, you realize it's actually good.
I don't know how a person motivates themselves to go beyond the bare minimum once they've reached eudaimonia, especially if it feels like you got there before you were supposed to. The problem is this: a duck on a pond no bigger than a parking lot can look completely content. Not even a real pond, an apartment complex pond, the kind some housing authority approved because a water feature reads as amenity on a brochure. It exists for a notion of beauty someone decided on in a meeting. That pond is the duck's entire universe, fundamentally, and nobody probably even looks at it. It can have its ducklings by its side, a mate, enough of a reservoir, even a hidden cubby to retreat to when it rains. And at the end of the day, it's still just one duck on one small, decorative pond. There are so many other creatures, so many other ponds, so many things the duck has never seen or experienced. There are always more ducks. There are more connections to be formed than the ones immediately around you.
And while we're on the subject of more, there's also the flip side: the presence of excess. Our culture insists that everything has to be magnificent, that more is always the answer. When that message is so mainstream, it's easy to forget what philosophers like Seneca and Marcus Aurelius kept returning to, something I keep coming back to in my own writing too: stoic practices. Knowing that once you've had every kind of bread and every kind of wine, you don't need to keep tasting brown bread, sweet bread, sourdough, brioche, hot dog buns, buttered buns, croissants, magnum ice cream stuck into croissants, put in a freezer, turned into popsicles for summer. At some point, you have to know when it's enough.
Some philosophers take that to the extreme: "once it's enough, that's your cue to leave." I think that's a little more than unreasonable, honestly. Either way, I find myself again sitting at my keyboard, clickity-clack, sometimes on my phone, sometimes on my laptop, writing all of this down. I'm never entirely sure any of it has a purpose beyond serving as a kind of catharsis, a way of clearing my own head. But maybe that's purpose enough. Let's circle back to eudaimonia itself.
What is eudaimonia, really? I don't want to define it in reality; that would be pedantic. But it's a state in which you believe you've achieved everything enough to be content. You might even call it heaven on earth, except it might be more than that. Heaven on earth implies perfection. Eudaimonia doesn't require things to be perfect, it just means you've reached the utmost level of happiness available to you. Which is a strange thing to know about yourself. Recognizing that you've arrived takes a certain kind of insight, and I'm not sure I have it. I'm not sure anyone does. As humans, we're greedy by nature. We're the ones who keep reaching for the sourdough after we've already said the brioche was enough. It's hard to know you've reached "enough" when you can barely define enough for a single person, let alone for the people around you. And then there's the deeper question of whether the happiness itself is permanent, whether you even understand its shape, or whether you actually feel happy, or just feel like you're supposed to.
All of that is far too nuanced to fit into one essay, and honestly, I'm not capable of writing anything longer than this anyway. But it's worth saying: the happiness you have right now is not something to aim at once and be done with.
Last thing: agape. The highest rung on the ladder of love, and the inverse of the merely human, because it's the highest form of love there is. No book, no philosophy, no theory, no anecdote has convinced me that this highest form of love arrives the way eudaimonia does. Eudaimonia runs on "enough," on knowing when to stop reaching for the next kind of bread. Agape, if it's real, seems to run on the opposite logic entirely: it doesn't know when to stop. The niche version of it I keep thinking about is Alcestis, Admetus's wife, who agrees to die in his place when Death comes to collect him, because Apollo had struck a deal that someone else could take the debt. Nobody made her do it. There was no negotiation, no future accounting, she just decided his life was worth more than hers and handed it over. That is what agape actually costs when you stop being poetic about it. Not romance. An actual body, given away. So let me set it aside, not because it isn't real, but because it isn't shaped like the question I'm actually trying to answer here. That's not what I want to talk about.
What I want to talk about is this: say you have enough insight to recognize that the happiness you've achieved is the highest form you're capable of, that this is eudaimonia, and not agape, just eudaimonia. What do you do from here.
That's the actual question behind the title of this post, the perils of eudaimonia, because I'm asking myself, more than anyone else: what's the game plan? You've reached a high state of happiness, a eudaimonia, but you've still got life left to live. Do you throw in the towel and say, "that's the happiest I'll ever be, I'm calling it"? Or do you realize that eudaimonia is just a stage, that there's something after it, that it may or may not be enough for you?
Admitting that eudaimonia isn't enough takes guts. Not all of us have that kind of nerve. I'm not sure I do. So when you finally make that admission, you end up...
[silence]
There's a caveat I haven't addressed yet: knowing you're in eudaimonia can be like lighting a candle in a dark night. Yes, the night is dark, but you can still see the stars if you dare to look up.
If instead you decide that being in eudaimonia is a form of self-awareness, and self-awareness is light, that's the general metaphor, then lighting up the night has a cost. The stars get dimmer. Suddenly you can see everything, and everyone, far too clearly. And I don't know if I like that.
Sometimes you just don't like light. You don't need a migraine to find it annoying. The shadows sharpen, and the tidy, fundamental story you've told yourself about your life starts unraveling at the seams. You start wondering what was right, what was wrong, what else you could have changed.
So I circle back to the real question: the perils of eudaimonia. I've already covered a lot of the caveats: getting to eudaimonia, realizing you're there, and the fact that being there might not even be the best thing. The Sisyphean metaphor, in other words.
It's not enough to just imagine Sisyphus happy. What if we modify it and imagine Sisyphus content, which would mean something different than happy, and that's the whole point.
I think what that would require is Sisyphus being content with pushing the boulder up, however many times he has to, for however long he has to. But I don't think that actually changes anything, because Sisyphus's life is two dimensional: forward or backward, up the same slope, no third angle. That's a realization I'm having right now. Sisyphus doesn't have the liberty to let time pass at his own pace. There's sweat running down his forehead, and depending on the day it either makes his foot slip and sends him back to the bottom, or it works as lubrication and gets the boulder that much further up. Either way it never rises off him as steam, never becomes a cloud, never comes back down as rain, because the weather in Hell never changes. Even his own sweat isn't allowed a second act.
I think I just realized Sisyphus can never be content. He can be happy, sure, but never content, because to be content he'd have to accept that he'll never get the boulder to stay up, and, more importantly, that he'll never be allowed to stop pushing it. He'd have to make peace with the fact that his life is a misery. And I honestly don't think that's what eudaimonia is. Eudaimonia is more about contentment than happiness, but there still has to be some joy inside that contentment for it to mean anything.
Which brings me to the part I actually came here to write. Put them side by side, then: agape, eudaimonia, gratitude, Sisyphus, the duck.
Agape doesn't know when to stop. Eudaimonia is built entirely on knowing when to stop. Marriage, I think, was never supposed to be agape. Agape asks for a kind of self-erasure a healthy marriage shouldn't ask of you. But marriage can be eudaimonia. It can be the "enough" the stoics keep pointing at, not a ceiling you hit once and coast on, but a kind of enough you keep choosing, on purpose, over and over.
That's closer to what Tolstoy was after in the parts of his fiction people wave off as fundamentalist, the provincial, unglamorous life. Levin out mowing a field alongside his peasants in Anna Karenina, losing himself in the rhythm of the scythe until the day stops being effort and starts being something closer to prayer. Land, faith, a family, the same rhythms every season. Not agape. Not eudaimonia in the achieved-once, mountaintop sense either. Just a life built out of the same fundamentals, repeated, until the repetition itself becomes the meaning. Earlier in this essay I said that kind of tidy, fundamental story unravels the moment the lights come on and the shadows sharpen. I'm less sure of that now.
Here's my actual misgiving, the one I keep circling back to: I always thought gratitude had to be earned. That's why Eliquis made sense to me before marriage did. I could point to the residency, the training, the specific suffering that purchased the specific gratitude. It felt honest that way. Transactional, in a way I trusted.
But this, my wife, this life, doesn't feel like it was earned the same way. It doesn't feel like a journey I suffered through to arrive at. It feels like a destination I got to stumble into. And I know, in truth, it was probably a journey too, just a fun one, one that didn't announce itself as struggle, so I never counted it as one. I think I'd assumed gratitude needed suffering to be trustworthy, that if it arrived too easily, it was somehow duplicitous, borrowed, about to be taken back. I don't think that's true anymore. Arriving early doesn't mean arriving falsely.
Which makes me reconsider the duck and Sisyphus, too. I spent a lot of this essay arguing that the duck can't really be content on its small pond, that Sisyphus can never be content pushing his boulder, that contentment requires some impossible acceptance neither of them could actually reach. But maybe I had that backwards. Maybe the duck is content precisely because it never knew the pond was decorative, never knew it was somebody else's idea of beauty, and just lived in it anyway. Maybe Sisyphus is content the moment he stops needing the boulder to stay up, not because he's given up, but because staying up was never actually the point.
Bowie knew this. Ground control spends the whole song trying to keep Major Tom tethered, checklist, countdown, the return trajectory all mapped out in advance. And at some point he just stops reporting back. He's not in distress. He's just further out than the mission planned for, quiet, apparently unbothered, and nobody down below ever gets an explanation for why. Maybe there isn't one. Maybe he just found something out there that didn't require him to come back and account for it.
Maybe eudaimonia isn't all that society, all that philosophy, has trumped it up to be. Maybe it's just really knowing that you're happy, content, whatever linear adjective you want to use, and living inside that feeling instead of interrogating it. It doesn't have to be the final stage. It can be a plateau that goes on, and on.
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| Here am I floating around my tin can |
