The pursuit of happiness is fundamental to human life. We are always looking to be happier. This is simply human nature.
Yet we rarely stop to ask ourselves just what it is that we’re pursuing. What is happiness? Is it a feeling, a state, or an activity? Is it the same for everybody or always individual? How should we answer these questions?
Our goal with this course is to step back and examine the fundamentals of happiness. By building a strong understanding of the basic concepts underlying happiness, we hope to build a foundation for effective practical solutions for questions of work and meaning.
Through our work, we hope to cast light on ideas of human purpose, calling, and human nature, all in pursuit of a lasting vision of happiness. We hope you will join us as we work to paint a complete picture of a fulfilled life.
Course Outline
This course will be split up into six units, each presented as a half-hour lecture covering the main points of the topic.
Unit One: How Should We Pursue Happiness?
We want to begin by asking what the essential questions are. What do we need to know about happiness? What is essential for us to understand for a happy life? And what approach should we take to answer these questions? Our goal is to define our approach to set ourselves up for a clear answer down the line.
Unit Two: What is Happiness?
What is happiness? Is it an emotion? An achievement? A state of mind? Our goal is to establish just what it is that happiness is, what role it plays in our lives, and what it means to experience happiness. We want to understand happiness through reason and personal experience, both objectively and subjectively. We want to bring together this universal and particular understanding of happiness in one clear picture.
Unit Three: Purposeful Living
Fulfillment is rooted in purpose. We want a clear direction and clear goal in life. What offers this sort of clear direction? Here, we’ll talk about the main components of purpose and the different things required to pursue a goal in life. We’ll also spend time considering how we can identify a sense of purpose. What is it that makes us feel purposeful in life? How is it that we can pursue a sense of calling? And is there any notion of purpose that we all share as humans?
Unit Four: Pursuing Your Calling
The highest form of purpose is a sense of calling—the sense that you as an individual have a duty in life. What gives us this sense of calling? What makes a calling real and purposeful? For many, we might already have a sense of calling in life. But what should we do if we have none? Is there a path to calling for everyone? If we can establish a clear notion of a shared calling in life, this may well be a path to purpose for everybody.
Unit Five: The Soul and Human Nature
Our understanding of human happiness must be rooted in human nature. With that in mind, we have to understand the essence of the human person. What makes a human a human? Typically, we’ll answer this with some notion of the soul, whatever that might be. However, it’s clear that there are many different ways of understanding the soul. Which of these perspectives is correct? Is it irrational or unscientific to hold these beliefs? And how can they bring us closer to a clear picture of happiness? If after all this we manage to find a clear vision of what a person is, then we’re well equipped to propose a final picture of the happy life.
Unit Six: Flourishing and Fulfillment
Our proposed picture of happiness is the notion of flourishing. Flourishing is a vision of happiness rooted in the fulfillment of human potential. Flourishing is based in our potential as humans. Looking at human nature, flourishing asks what we are capable of and what we are meant to do. Flourishing offers a picture of human life where each of us is called to live out our fullest potential, making the most of our abilities as humans and becoming most fully who we are meant to be. This is a universal path to purpose, one we can all pursue to find lasting fulfillment.
Fundamentals of Happiness Course
Purchase the Fundamentals of Happiness course to get permanent access to our six-unit course, including video lectures with questions for reflection and review. We are excited to share our first course at a 50% discount for a limited time as we begin our work.
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