OUP's Guides to the Good Life

Guides to the Good Life

In accessible and friendly guides, drawing on philosophy from the ancient world through modern times, this series highlights some of the transformative ideas that philosophers have had about the good life, and the practices and ways of life that help us to pursue it. Books in the series offer philosophical guidance about how to approach the sort of everyday questions that make up the texture of our lives: What should we value in life? How can we be good to one another? How should we spend our time? How can we focus in a chaotic world? How should we think about death? How can we mend broken relationships? What does it mean to succeed in life? How should we treat our planet?

Above all, the series is dedicated to the idea that philosophy can be, as it was for hundreds of years in the ancient world, a way of life. It can enhance the ways of life we already feel pulled toward, and help us to engage with them more authentically and fully...


Living for Pleasure
An Epicurean Guide to Life
by Emily A. Austin
9780197558324
Hardcover
01 November 2022

On Being and Becoming
An Existentialist Approach to Life
by Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei
9780190913656
Hardcover
09 November 2020
Guides to the Good Life

And also from OUP:

One Life to Lead: The Mysteries of Time and the Goods of Attachment Hardcover – February 26, 2025
by Samuel Scheffler (Author)

oup 1 (800) 445-9714

“happily ever after”

"Happily ever after is only true if you have three minutes to live." 

Dan Gilbert

This quote gets right to the heart of how our minds lie to us when it comes to happiness. Our brain often think in terms of 'happily ever after.' But real life isn't a fairytale, and happiness isn't some magical spell that lasts forever. Our minds are quickly adapt— even to the best things in life. https://www.threads.net/@lauriesantosofficial/post/DFuwo8LMf8K?xmt=AQGzzc7x5XX4OHvgULk3zLZrImszyuOOiYI6x5dnoe5fMQ

Phil.Oliver@mtsu.edu

👣Solvitur ambulando

💭Sapere aude

Russell’s happy merger

"Make your interests gradually wider and more impersonal, until bit by bit the walls of the ego recede, and your life becomes increasingly merged in the universal life." — BertrandRussell, The Conquest of Happiness

I agree with Russell in spirit, but "personal transcendence" requires at least enough ego to generate those wider interests. I'd say you should make your interests personal and expansive. Inclusive. Connective. "Larger than yourself." Pretty sure that's what he meant anyway. Impersonal means more than merely  personal. Interpersonal. We don't need zero ego, we need a social ego that bonds us with our species and with the future of life. That's how you transcend time and mortality. Or try.

Note: he says not that the ego recedes but that its walls do.  They become permeable. The self doesn't disappear, it grows and becomes part of "universal life." The trick is to feel and embody that before shedding mortal form. It's Peter Ackroyd's "trans-end-dance, a.k.a. the dance of death" (Plato Papers).

Maria Popova: Bertrand Russell died on this day in 1970, having lived nearly a century and won the Nobel Prize, leaving us his immortal wisdom on how to grow old.

https://www.themarginalian.org/2018/07/03/how-to-grow-old-bertrand-russell/

Young Alan Watts

Alan Watts, born on this day in 1915, was in his twenties and living through the second World War of his lifetime when he wrote this beautiful letter to his parents about living with inner sanity in an insane world:

https://www.themarginalian.org/2017/12/27/collected-letters-of-alan-watts/

Meaning crisis

What is the number one goal of your life? "Professor of Happiness" @arthurcbrooks says that in the 60s, finding meaning was the number one goal of most college students. Now, it's not even in the top 5 goals! In this conversation Above the Noise with Brooks, he helps you break down why we have lost this search for meaning, as well as the science backed pillars that can help us all find our own deeply meaningful lives!

https://www.threads.net/@thesundaypaper/post/DEfvDrQyShm?xmt=AQGzf9ck9iNu4oKrP1EgcPgZtfPk5cLuHy5BdtSXu-noNA

Burkeman’s imperfectionism

In a world that often demands perfection, it's easy to get caught up in the belief that we need to have everything figured out before we can move forward. But what if we started from a different assumption?

The concept of "imperfectionism," as Oliver Burkeman explains it, invites us to accept that there will always be loose ends, unfinished tasks, and areas for growth - and that's okay.

https://www.threads.net/@lauriesantosofficial/post/DEXNnhcol4q?xmt=AQGzBj3nd_6GOS04YXhp6bTJ3iU0iJ2NIp_-S-eHakwzdg

Mind cure

"Not to put too glib a gloss on it: there is no denying that the rampant “spread of the movement” was “due to practical fruits,” as William James remarks affably in his 1902 lectures, The Varieties of Religious Experience. Perhaps it did not cure tuberculosis, but what James called “the religion of healthy-mindedness” could not have amassed such a sizable following if it did not help people cope with their daily frustrations. Admittedly, it was helpful only to those already disposed to pathological optimism: James joked that mind cure produced such a militantly cheerful attitude that “complaints of the weather are getting to be forbidden in many households.”

But different temperaments require different medicines, and “mind-cure gives to some of us serenity, moral poise, and happiness.” As for the rest of us, those burdened with what James terms a “sick soul,” darker stratagems (prime among them more traditional species of fire-and-brimstone fundamentalism) are available. Perhaps because my soul is sick, I cannot share James’s sanguinity about mind cure.

The most charitable thing I can say is that, from a certain point of view, its popularity is understandable. It at least purported to relieve—which meant it at least took seriously—many of the symptoms for which the establishment was equipped to offer nothing but condolences. As the historian Donald Meyer notes in his witty study, The Positive Thinkers, “Statistics on the incidence of diffuse dissatisfactions, unfixed discontent, vague depletion and free-floating unhappiness do not exist.”

We cannot know whether “nervousness” and “neurasthenia” are uniquely modern ailments, but we can and do know that they hardened into acknowledged conditions at the turn of the century. Medieval peasants may have been (indeed, almost certainly were) anxious and unfulfilled in their own way, but it was not until the late 1800s that malcontents understood their complaints as maladies in want of remedy..."

"All Things Are Too Small: Essays in Praise of Excess" by Becca Rothfeld: https://a.co/d9iUwJ4

The light will win

Though possibly not in the present.

This was a good and timely holiday read.

"What had Bruno said about the future? When we face our need to control it, we are better able to resist that need, and to live in the present.

I stopped reading news articles. I stopped watching videos. My new rule about drinking had been an attempt to rid myself of a crippling attachment. The internet was yet another crippling attachment, and so I banned it.

I walked for hours each afternoon on knobby paths along the cliffs above the sea. I walked to a lighthouse and watched its magnificent crystal flash and turn.

There’s that old myth about the humble lighthouse and the giant battleship. The ship has mistaken the lighthouse for a boat, a little pissant boat that better get out of its way. The captain of the battleship comes on the radio, to command the little boat to move, a boat that he doesn’t understand is a lighthouse on a rock. The captain believes he is in a power struggle with the thing in his path and that the more forceful and arrogant he is, the more likely it will yield. He is not wrong that he is engaged in a struggle for dominance. He’s only wrong that he’ll win."

"Creation Lake: A Novel" by Rachel Kushner: https://a.co/9Mc2OTr

Best Happiness books of ‘24?

#14 should be #1

https://open.substack.com/pub/nextbigideaclub/p/24-must-read-happiness-books-of-2024?r=35ogp&utm_medium=ios

You don’t need a pill: Neo

It is not how much we have, but how much we enjoy, that makes happiness
True happiness is... to enjoy the present, without anxious dependence upon the future. — Keanu Reeves