As this run of Philosophy of Happiness winds down once more, I hope you’ll pause—just for a moment—before the noise of the semester spills back in. Look over the path you’ve walked. You’ve wandered through Epicurus’s calm garden, felt Haybron’s steady analytic pressure, listened to Waldinger’s reminders that relationships shape the very texture of a life, and wrestled with Flanagan’s bracing insistence that “happiness” is too simple a word for creatures as complicated as we are. Burkeman’s 4000 Weeks surely left its mark as well—its gentle but unflinching reminder that time is both brutally finite and strangely generous when we stop pretending we can manage it like a spreadsheet.
Solnit, in Wanderlust, urged you to trust the wisdom of your own footsteps—to see that walking isn’t just locomotion but a clarifying act, a way of letting the mind catch up to the body. She reminded us that movement through the world can loosen the knots we carry, and that sometimes the surest route to understanding is the one taken at three miles an hour.
Rowlands, through The Word of Dog, asked you to look at happiness with a creaturely humility—to recognize that joy often emerges from simple, unguarded presence. His canine teachers, in their unpretentious intelligence, pushed back against our human habit of overthinking everything. They nudged us toward a happiness grounded in loyalty, companionship, and a kind of moral candor we too often forget we’re capable of.
And Bregman’s Moral Ambition refused to let happiness shrink to mere contentment. He challenged you to connect your well-being with the work you choose to do in the world—to imagine that purpose, decency, and impact are not luxuries but part of a fully realized life. If he was right, then happiness grows in proportion to the courage we muster to aim ourselves at something larger than our private satisfactions.
Taken together, these three "recommended" voices offered a quiet counter-current to the noise of the age: keep moving, stay present, and let your life lean toward the good. They’re not shortcuts—they’re invitations. And like everything else worth learning, they ask only that you continue, step by step, into whatever comes next.
None of these authors promised easy comfort. Why should they? The world has grown no softer in the past two years—its uncertainties still swirl, its crises still test our patience, our courage, and our hope. Yet you’ve seen that happiness isn’t about sealing yourself off from difficulty; it’s about turning toward life with a fuller kind of attention. A willingness to stay awake. A discipline of noticing the small good things, and making room for them.
William James once wrote that our faith in life is a kind of wager—an imaginative leap toward possibility when the evidence is mixed. That wager feels even more necessary now. So carry what you’ve learned into your own days: that meaning and joy aren’t delivered fully formed; they’re built, reclaimed, and sometimes salvaged. That connection matters. That your weeks—however many of them remain—are worth spending on things that let you become more fully yourself.
You don’t need to have it all figured out. You do need to keep going. Stay curious. Stay generous. Stay alert for delight, even in hard weather. And as you trace the semester’s arc, remember the other companions who walked beside us.
Farewell for now—and onward through the fog.
I'll just add: don't fear Artificial Intelligence, make it work for you as a tool and not a replacement. You still have the responsibility and the joy of thinking for--but not by--yourself.
So go ahead and talk to AI, about your schoolwork or whatever, but be entirely transparent: clearly identify which statements are your own and which are AI's, and always corroborate its accurate information while calling out the hallucinations. Interact with it, don't passively absorb it.
I can't repeat Susan Neiman's message often enough: to be enlightened and grown up is to think for yourself, and to want to. Hannah Arendt was right: to be grown up is to love the world enough to take responsibility for it. It's what good parents do (and every responsible adult is a parent to the next generation, whether there are children under their roof or not).
So remember: no single stage of life is necessarily the best or worst. Be responsible, be happy, be good, enjoy your life, and share the joy.
Have a good break, and a good next semester. Maybe I'll see you next Spring in Philosophy in Recent American Fiction (Tuesdays at 6 pm, auditors welcome), or next Fall in Existentialism.
If you're graduating: congrats, good luck, be happy!
Later. Au revoir.
Later. Au revoir.
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