Is It Even Possible To Be Happy?

Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, designed to help bring those four key Stoic virtues, courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world. Is it even possible to be happy? A master does not actually master anything. Ask any great athlete, musician, chef, writer, surgeon, teacher, coach, comedian, and they'll tell you they're not done improving, because that's what a craft is, something you spend your whole life getting a little bit better at. And the Stoics understood this, that the highest level one could attain, they said, was the sage, a level they said that you don't actually reach.

You just make progress towards. Aristotle said this about virtue, that you can become endlessly more wise, courageous, just, and disciplined, just as you can keep getting better at any skill or profession. And when we were talking about this on the podcast a little while back with Harvard professor and happiness researcher Arthur Brooks, he actually put happiness in the same category. I started off doing this work years ago saying I want to find the secret to happiness. And that's wrong because you can't be happy, but you can be as happy as you're, which is an Aristotelian notion as opposed to a Platonic notion.

You can get happier. And the the goal is putting yourself, your life on a on a jagged, messy path toward happiness. happierness. Epictetus said something similar that he was riffing on Socrates when he said, Just as one person delights in improving his farm and another his horse, I delight in attending to my own improvement day by day. That's the path to a good

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