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eudaimonia, the ancient Greek word for “human flourishing.”

Emily Esfahani Smith • The Power of Meaning: The true route to happiness

Presence is far more intricate and rewarding an art than productivity. Ours is a culture that measures our worth as human beings by our efficiency, our earnings, our ability to perform this or that. The cult of productivity has its place, but worshipping at its altar daily robs us of the very capacity for joy and wonder that makes life worth living... See more

Maria Popova • 13 Life-Learnings from 13 Years of Brain Pickings

the quality of our lives and the health of our society depends, to a large degree, on how well we treat each other in the minute interactions of daily life.

David Brooks • How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen

Existential ideas and attitudes have embedded themselves so deeply into modern culture that we hardly think of them as existentialist at all. People (at least in relatively prosperous countries where more urgent needs don’t intervene) talk about anxiety, dishonesty and the fear of commitment. They worry about being in bad faith, even if they don’t

James K. A. Smith • On the Road with Saint Augustine: A Real-World Spirituality for Restless Hearts

“In the end, people don't view their life as merely the average of all its moments—which, after all, is mostly nothing much plus some sleep. For human beings, life is meaningful because it is a story. A story has a sense of a whole, and its arc is determined by the significant moments, the ones where something happens. Measurements of people's minu... See more

Atul Gawande • Being Mortal

Hope, writes the moral philosopher Kieran Setiya,18 “keeps the flicker of potential agency alive.”

Brad Stulberg • Master of Change: How to Excel When Everything Is Changing – Including You

“Deeper satisfaction comes not from feeling good, he taught, but from doing good: from cultivating and maintaining virtuous habits that balance one’s own life and create and deepen ties with others.”

Jonathan Rauch • The Happiness Curve: Why Life Gets Better After 50

wholeness isn’t something we acquire by stacking achievements or checking boxes or acquiring products or consumer goods. And I worry about this because I have two small children myself. They are five and six, and I’m thinking often about the world that they’re growing up in and what is that world telling them about who they should be and what succe... See more

Vivek Murthy — To Be a Healer

Ethan Kross, a psychologist and the director of the University of Michigan Emotion and Self-Control Laboratory, says,

“We’re constantly trying to make meaning out of our experiences, and our mind is flexibly constructed to help us do so.”