18.10.2026 Diary XLVIII Eudaimonia: feeling happy and living well

18.10.2026 Diary Page XLVIII

Being happy is a feeling, living well is a task. When we call both by the same word, both come up short.

Sunday. I didn't hurry in the morning, I made the coffee slowly, I looked out the window. Sunday mornings in Ankara have a certain quiet, and in that quiet I always ask myself the same question: am I happy?

Every time I ask, the answer changes. One Sunday it's "yes", another Sunday it's "I don't know". Today it was "I don't know", and for the first time I thought this answer wasn't a bad thing. Maybe the question was wrong.

Today's word is eudaimonia.

Inside the word

Eudaimonia is built from the words eu and daimon. Eu means good. Daimon in Greek means a kind of spirit, a share, a fortune. There are readings that unpack the word as “having a good daimon.” What a daimon is was not one single thing in Greek thought either. So I'm not writing this as a definitive definition; it's only the sound inside the word.

In Turkish it is usually rendered as mutluluk, happiness. In English too it was translated as happiness for a long time, and later “human flourishing”, growing as a human, blossoming, became more common. That translators have had to struggle this much shows the word doesn't overlap with our happiness.

What Aristotle says

The first book of the Nicomachean Ethics opens with this word. Already in the fourth chapter Aristotle makes an observation: everyone calls the highest good eudaimonia, and they also say it is living well and acting well. But when it comes to what it is, people part ways. For some it is pleasure, for some honour, for some money.

In the fifth chapter he talks about three ways of life: the life of pleasure, the political life, the life of contemplation. He is a bit harsh with those who choose pleasure; he counts them as having chosen to live like cattle. He also raises an objection against those who choose honour: honour lies in the hands of the one who gives it, that is, outside.

Here one sentence caught my attention very much, and today I thought about it for a long time: eudaimonia is not defined as a mood. It is not a state but an activity.

Ergon

In the seventh chapter Aristotle builds his famous function argument. In Greek, function, work, task is ergon.

The idea goes like this. The flute player, the sculptor, every craftsperson has a work, and for them the good lies in doing that work well. The same goes for the eye, the hand, the foot: each has a function. So the human being, as a human being, must also have a work. What does the human work consist of? Not just living, because plants live too. Not perceiving either, animals perceive too. What remains is a life that has reason.

The conclusion he reaches is this: the good for a human being is the activity of the soul in accordance with virtue, and if there are several virtues, in accordance with the most complete one. Aristotle adds one more thing: over a complete life. One swallow does not make a spring, he says, and one day does not make a person happy either. I'm conveying the sentence not word for word but by its meaning.

There is a lot of writing that discusses the weak points of this argument. Some writers find both the assumption that a human has a single function and the move from the function of a species to the good of an individual forced. I know these objections. Still, the feeling the argument leaves me with is this: the good life is not about something happening to me, but about me doing something.

Feeling and doing

This distinction is useful to me, because it lets me tell apart two voices inside me.

The first voice measures happiness like the weather. Am I light today, do I feel at ease, is my heart open? The second voice asks something else. What did I do well today, what did I take care over, what kind of person did I act like?

Aristotle chooses the second. Pleasure is necessary too, he doesn't deny that. When an activity is done well, pleasure accompanies it, he says. But pleasure is something that comes behind, like a reward, not the goal. When you turn the goal into pleasure, strangely, you miss the goal.

This is related to a concept I wrote about earlier. In the hexis entry I wrote that character is built through repetition. Eudaimonia looks like the name for living that character. Hexis is the ground, eudaimonia is walking on that ground.

ADHD and mood

As someone with ADHD, I know very well why measuring happiness as a feeling is exhausting. My mood changes even within a single day. When interest opens up, I come alive inside; when interest closes, I go out. In the morning I make a strong plan, and in the afternoon the same plan looks like a burden.

If I test the good life with this wavering measure, every day turns into a failed exam. A day's mood says a lot, but it doesn't say the whole of a good life. Aristotle's swallow sentence is comforting here: one day doesn't decide the verdict.

Since I was diagnosed at twenty-two, this is one of the things I have had to learn when measuring myself. Mood is data, but it isn't a verdict. In the epokhe entry I talked about suspending judgment. I want to apply this to the feeling of happiness too: I look at how I feel today, but I don't pass judgment on my life.

When I tried medication a second time at twenty-eight, this question came up in front of me again. I can't make a medical assessment of it. I'm only noting this: being able to do and feeling are two separate things, and most of the time I had put the second in place of the first.

Walking

It seems to me that my love of walking has something to do with this concept.

I can't tell when walking makes me happy. On some walks I feel at ease, on others I fight with the sentences in my head. But when the walk is over, I almost always say the same thing: I'm glad I walked. This sentence comes regardless of what I felt while walking.

This may be related to what Aristotle says. The good life doesn't come from the pleasure I feel in the moment, but from what I'm doing in that moment being right for me. Walking puts something in place in me. I do it even on days when I can't feel it, and it is good because I do it.

On Sundays this idea is more noticeable. On weekdays everything is tied to work. Because Sunday is a day not tied to work, I can see the activity itself: making coffee, cooking the food myself, walking, writing. None of them serves a result. Still, all of them are activities, and there is care in all of them.

What comes from outside

It would be wrong to think Aristotle has a purely activity-based view. In the first book he says that external goods are needed too: health, friends, a certain material comfort, luck. Without these, virtuous activity becomes harder, and very great misfortunes can spoil eudaimonia.

I have to write this honestly. On some days what breaks down isn't my own effort but the circumstances. On those days saying “I didn't live well” may be unfair. Aristotle doesn't lean on the will alone either.

This can be read together with what I wrote in the amor fati entry. The circumstances may not be in my hands, but what I'll do in the face of them is partly in my hands. I use the word "partly" on purpose.

The question I'll ask myself

I'm not dropping the question of whether I'm happy, but I'm placing a second question next to it. What did I do with care today?

Today's answer is small. I made the coffee without hurrying. I looked out the window. While writing this entry I read every sentence once more.

I don't know what my happiness score is. But this answer doesn't let me say “today was wasted.” Living well on a Sunday can be this simple. In the weekly review article I wrote about how Sunday evening can be used as a method. Today I approached it not as a method but as a question.

A piece next to the concept

Beethoven: Symphony No. 6 "Pastoral", second movement.

The symphony was first played in 1808, in Vienna, at a long concert at the Theater an der Wien. The second movement is called "Scene by the brook". A slow, flowing, constantly undulating movement; waters, the sound of leaves, a gentle progression. At the end of the movement Beethoven wrote bird calls into the score by name: nightingale, quail, cuckoo. At the beginning of the symphony he also added a note saying that it should be understood not as a painting but as the expression of feelings.

Its link with eudaimonia, I think, is in the movement not hurrying to get anywhere. The movement isn't going toward a result; the flowing itself is the movement. It's familiar to someone who loves walking too: the road is an activity independent of the destination.

Toward tomorrow

Tomorrow is Monday. Today I wrote about the good life of a single person. Then I realised that Aristotle doesn't think of it alone. The eighth and ninth books of the Ethics are devoted entirely to another word: philia. Friendship, attachment, loving someone. Tomorrow I'm opening that door a little.