Depressed and miserable

>depressed and miserable
>start reading Aristotle to learn about the nature of happiness and how to achieve it
>he says just be good looking, born into a good family and have money brah! If you’re ugly, poor or friendless you won’t be truly happy
Wtf? Now what do I do now bros? What do I read? I give up.

Attached: 60CFB5FA-C0BC-4987-A5AE-2DE80222D9DD.jpg (1276x1600, 421K)

Other urls found in this thread:

wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/The_Science_of_Winning_at_Life
twitter.com/SFWRedditImages

Relevant quote
Yet evidently, as we said, it needs the external goods as well; for it is impossible, or not easy, to do noble acts without the proper equipment. In many actions we use friends and riches and political power as instruments; and there are some things the lack of which takes the lustre from happiness, as good birth, goodly children, beauty; for the man who is very ugly in appearance or ill-born or solitary and childless is not very likely to be happy, and perhaps a man would be still less likely if he had thoroughly bad children or friends or had lost good children or friends by death. As we said, then, happiness seems to need this sort of prosperity in addition; for which reason some identify happiness with good fortune, though others identify it with virtue.

Read Kant instead, also stop treating happiness as a goal (it is far more helpful to analyze it under the category of "grace")

Sorry, bro. The truth hurts.

What would being happy mean for you?

>be good looking, born into a good family and have money
What happens when you lose the good looks, lose the family, and lose the money?

You kill yourself

This thread made me laugh out loud OP. Thanks for the joy.

based and blackpilled

You know that he's just laying out common opinions about happiness at the beginning, right?

Like, when he says:

>for which reason some identify happiness with good fortune, though others identify it with virtue

He follows it up in the rest of the book by discussing virtue.

read Marcus Aurelius instead

Don’t listen to this retard, read Seneca. Aurelius was a fag and Meditations was just his diary, not a true explanation on stoicism.

>seeking practical life advice from ancient pedophiles
my lad

Where else do you find it?

I like the religious undertones you have there

the bible

Serious answers please

the koran

The bible and the koran

>Koran
>not Quran
You’ve exposed yourselves as heathens. Repent now and I shall grant mercy.

Got to respect his realism and honesty

I’m pretty sure that was earlier in the book. Here he’s outlining his actual thoughts on the qualities required to attain happiness. Obviously there’s more to it but I don’t think he’s really that far off. People with all of those qualities are much more likely to be happy than those without them.

This, the kantpill is the only way. Simply look at how difficult happiness is to obtain and realize it cannot be the goal of man to obtain it. Look to duty

Read this:
wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/The_Science_of_Winning_at_Life

Attached: chad rationalist.jpg (2047x788, 256K)

>Not Rufus
Top lel

>Not Epictetus
Harharhar

>Not Epicurus
Boing

>Epicurus, the founder of Epicureanism
>stoic
(You)

the absolute state of greeks

Embrace dionysism.

>removing your dead weight so as to not drag down the rest of society is a bad thing

I guess the most important thing are friends. Socrates didn't have money or good looks and his family wasn't outstanding.

In the Ethics, he states quite clearly that happiness is to some extent dependant on external factors like beauty and friends.

On the other hand, he did make an aside saying that a man who faces difficulty and deals with it nobly could be called a "blessed man". Even if he was not happy.

>ape brain can't think beyond biological impulses

Yeah it's definitely friends. If you have a good social circle you are more likely to be employed, feel connected to your community, have your social needs catered to and it's even easier to find a partner.

Just read stoicism and also Lucretius mate. Once you start getting really sick and see how some people's suffering is absolutely unberable you will see that every little second that lacks suffering is a complete and total blessing.

Attached: omar-khayyam-100537.jpg (700x360, 41K)

Sure, but that's also not the end of the matter for him, right? The quoted passage is from the first book of the Nicomachean Ethics, there's a whole 9 remaining books to look into what ways of life make one happy, and their conditions.

All I'm saying is that if OP makes it to chapter 8 and thinks "well, guess I'm fucked", it's not really all there is to the matter.

read Plotinus' On Love

based and Plotinus pilled

Could I get a quick run down on how he expands on this?

Reading Nicomachean Ethics right now. He says being born ugly is nothing to be ashamed of because its out of your control (not a voluntary action, out of the realm of choice). Unless you're fat, which he quantitfies as a choice (not doing the things that keeps you from being ugly) in which case you should be ashamed.

Obedience to God is what makes us happy, all else is fleeting. The first and greatest commandment in Matthew 22:35-40 is "Thou shalt love thy Lord, thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind" Read the Bible, get to know Christ.

based mezuzah poster

agreed

>2 thousand year old pedophiles are superior to 2 thousand year old wisemen

bibble

The key to the passage is the line
>for which reason some identify happiness with good fortune, though others identify it with virtue.

The issue of significance for him is virtue and how it comes to be present in us. For some context, around this passage he refers to an issue in Plato's Meno without referring to it by name. By hypothesis, if happiness is attached to things out of your control, then there's no point in worrying about them, since there must be some ind of fate for things. But if there are things under our control that are tied to happiness...and that's the line of inquiry Aristotle picks up on.

One common mistake with reading him is putting too much weight in his initial assertions in the first book of a given treatise. In the Ethics, Physics, Metaphysics, he starts off by looking at common opinions about the matters under discussion, and then moves on from them dialectically to better established ones.

imagine taking advice of ancient slave owners on how to be happy.

Not Diógenes

Aristotle didn't have the same view of happiness that you have.

obedience to god simply means loving god as it translates to a synchronicity with the divine spirit. obedience to the law and to your religion doesn't necessarily translate into the love of god however.

The greeks had an ape tier understanding of the human soul. They didnt even possess an idea of becoming but crude determinism. Why take words from , in todays light, literaly plebs?

son did u even read the fucking book
he says these things matter, sure
but he also says that the most important thing is to be virtuous in order to achieve happines
and i don't believe you're so bad looking and born into a so bad family that you can't be happy