The Principles

How to Reimagine the World for Eudaimonia

By now, hopefully you’ve read the basics of eudaimonics, and its ends, or goals. So how are we to take the giant leap from an economic paradigm of human organization to a eudaimonic one — one that doesn’t just maximize income, but expands human possibility — in the real world? Let’s get concrete and discuss the means. I have to warn you: they’re probably not what you’re expecting, used to, or are familiar with.

Now, in one way, such means are straightforward. Just give people new titles — Chief Eudaimonia Officer or something similarly intriguing — throw money at them, let them hire a department, and hey presto, you’re done. And yet the more I thought about eudaimonia that way, the less satisfied I was. if I’ve learned anything about organizations, it’s that genuine, lasting, transformative, paradigmatic change — whether for a company, corporation, city, country — isn’t just about making up new titles and roles, tweaks to structure and function, but substance and essence. Not the hard stuff, but the soft stuff: culture, values, ideals, reasons, purpose, principles. Because those the what we use to interrogate, shape, and mold our raw ideas, choices, actions, and decisions with.

So I thought long and hard about what kinds of principles and values and purposes eudaimonia might demand in the real world. We’re used to novelty: we discard ideas like iPhones, always believing newest is best — yet no matter how deep I looked into modern thought, the less satisfying it was. It seemed to be missing the human point, the essence of a good life. And one day it occurred to me that the deepest and subtlest thinkers on the subject of life realizing itself aren’t new — but very, very old. Whether Eastern and Western, ancient philosophies and minds thought hard, deep, and long about eudaimonia — in ways that we seem to have forgotten today, which is precisely why their ideas are still timeless, where ours are largely disposable (can you remember the last economics or management book you read?).

So below are what I think of as a series of design principles for eudaimonia — lost in history, often forgotten by modernity, created over thousands of years, passed down from the dawn of human remembrance. We don’t have simple English words for many of the unfamiliar concepts below — they are rich, nuanced, subtle ideas, vastly more sophisticated than today’s. So to make them clearer, I’ll do something funny: use utterly trivial modern examples that we are familiar with. While that might seem strange, for the ancients, a good life wasn’t something to be read about in books like it is today, but woven into mundane, everyday life — experience, not dry theory. Thus, I’d bet the minds behind these ideas would heartily approve of such ideas embedded in the workaday, humdrum fabric of our lives — because that is precisely how they thought that lives blossom and flourish.

Let’s begin, and then we’ll discuss context of the principles a little more afterwards.

Mu is one of the fundamental precepts of the great philosophy called Zen, often translated as “no-mind”: not thinking can paradoxically brings us fuller lives than thinking. Whenever we are thinking, there’s complication, pain, hesitation, intellectualization, which sucks the marrow out of experience, presence, the moment — and so in a very real sense, unnecessary thinking is the enemy of living genuinely well. Consider one of the earliest modern high-Mu systems: the iPhone. It’s Zen in a box. Billions have them. Barely dozens have ever read the manual. You don’t have to think to use the iPhone — or the whole vast system that it unlocks. It just works, and every instant you don’t have to think about it is a moment you can really enjoy, live, be present in. High-Mu systems make more eudaimonia possible by making more room to experience life, and less need to overthink it.

Pu is often transliterated as “uncarved wood”: it’s the Taoist concept of being effortlessly, naturally one’s truest self. Think for a moment how difficult we’ve made that today: most of our organizations incentivize being anything but who we really are —we’re rewarded for being hungry consumers, aggressive entrepreneurs, calculating managers, playing roles — and the inevitable result is a yawning deficit of human possibility. Pu’s means being aware of one’s plain, undisguised, original nature — being allowed to be one’s whole and genuine self, at the many levels of selves: socially, personally, relationally, culturally, and so on. All that might sound esoteric, but I don’t think it really is. Here’s a trivial example. Sephora has an app where I can put on virtual makeup, trying on any kind of cosmetics I like, in any way I want. Is it a tiny example of Pu? You might not think so at first, yet there, people can retreat from social pressures to look this way or that way, don this or that disguise, and experiment with expressing their true selves, naturally, playfully, simply. Maybe you do or maybe you think it’s not Pu at all — in either case, you’ve got the idea of a high-Pu system a little bit.

Ziran is the subtle Taoist notion of “a thing becoming itself”, or natural self-transformation. I’d like us to think of it simply as how transformative a system really is. Most systems are low-Ziran: they don’t really transform lives — they just make life duller, harder, a little more painful. Here’s a simple example: Blue Apron. It’s a High-Mu system, sure: it takes the thinking out of cooking, making more room to enjoy the experience. And it’s also a tiny bit higher in Ziran than, for example, grocery shopping: I’m cooking things that are probably healthier, more interesting, and tastier than what I could probably do otherwise, developing, learning, growing —maybe even becoming more myself, in a little way, than I would be walking the aisles at a grocery store. Suddenly, my potential for eudaimonia grows. In that way, a high-Ziran system creates the potential for more eudaimonia.

Arete is the ancient Greek word for virtue, used in a very different way than we do today: virtue as a lived, everyday experience, not something we theorize about. High-Arete systems don’t have consumers and users — they have actors and agents. Their raison d’etre is to make people better at doing, not just better off by accumulating stuff. Consumers are passive and helpless to do anything but choose — actors are active and empowered to not just to choose, but create, hope, dream, imagine, rebel, grow. Let’s go back to the Sephora example. It might seem inconsequential, especially if you’re a straight guy. It’s not: by using it, I gain new skills and capabilities — I’m becoming better at doing, enacting tiny virtues, not just “choosing” objects — beauty, expression, connection, and so on. That’s the essence of a high-Arete system: transforming mute consumers into actors who are capable of living a little more fully.

Ren is the Confucian notion of compassionate wisdom, or benevolent humanity. It means something like “compassion and humanity in the short run are what is wisest in the long run”. I’ll give you a negative example. Uber’s probably the best example in recent history of lacking Ren. It surge prices during catastrophes, has a deeply toxic corporate culture, alienates its users, exploits it drivers, leaves nothing on the table — a nearly endless list of mishaps, all of which stem from having no compassionate wisdom, but being something more like a giant organismic frat-bro. Having no Ren hasn’t just cost Uber a bad reputation — it’s damaged it’s ability to build an organization that grows human potential, does positive things, becomes a valued part of society, contributes to the possibility of human life — and now it’s bleeding billions every year. Imagine how much more genuinely prosperous an Uber with a little Ren would and could have been. And yet Uber’s just a microcosm of a larger issue: without Ren, many institutions, from Wall Street to Silicon Valley, seem to operate with little compassionate wisdom, seeing it as the enemy of near-term profits — yet the result is a failure to fully, truly, wholly prosper, endure, and matter.

Wu-wei, which you’ve probably heard of, is the Taoist notion of action of “actionlessness action”, not meaning passivity, but minimizing mental action, desire, effort. Wu-wei means natural, instinctive flow, which frees human potential. You might think that a simple example of systems high in Wu-wei are AI, agents like Alexa, and self-driving cars, which let us act actionlessly — and you’d be partially right, but also wrong. Wu-wei’s not quite a simple as pressing a button and having things done for you. Such systems are only high in Wu-wei if, for example, while our self-driving cars are taking us places and our assistants are buying us things, we are able to flow, breathe, grow, realize ourselves better — not just, for example, sitting in that very self-driving car working even longer hours on projects that don’t mean much in the first place. Consider Blue Apron again: there’s a little more Wu-wei in it. You’re learning to cook better food not by struggling, frowning, thinking, but by doing, acting, learning, growing with less effort, and so maybe, just maybe, coming closer to eudaimonia.

Sunyata is the Buddhist notion that selves have no inherent existence. Sounds impossible. Let’s think about it for a moment. Your most eudaimonic moments — full of happiness, joy, meaning, and so on — are where “you” stop existing. You’re walking on the beach, enjoying dinner with friends, holding a loved one’s hands. No I. Us. All the little daily trials of existence vanish for a moment. You are in Sunyata, no-self— and that is why you feel boundless, joyous, whole. A high-Sunyata system encourages growth beyond the narrow egoistic self, which is where lives rich in meaning, fulfillment, and happiness begin. Consider Blue Apron again, as a trivial but revealing example: there’s also a high-Sunyata element to it. You’re probably not cooking for yourself, but making dinner for loved ones and friends, maybe with them. Maybe you even enter a meditative state when you’re cooking, being fully present in that moment, letting go. That’s the essence of a high-Sunyata system: having that kind of selfless, meditative, absorptive effect, which is where fulfilmment really begins.

Ahimsa is often reductively mistranslated by Western thinkers as the Eastern notion of nonviolence, but it’s something much more oceanic: in Eastern philosophies, it’s the source of all virtue. It literally means “the opposite of harm” — and in practice means “not to wish harm”. So it is as much about intention as action — about our beliefs and desires. Let’s go back to Uber: how did it get to be notorious for squeezing, intimidating, exploiting, hurting everyone in it’s wake? Zero Ahimsa: no desire not to do harm. And it would’ve been a more successful organization if it begun with Ahimsa wired into it’s mission, vision, beliefs, intentions. The same is true in many ways of the larger economy: with little Ahimsa, we ravage the planet, overfish the oceans, trap people in go-nowhere jobs, abandon towns — and try as we might, we can’t seem to operate any other way. Uber’s parable makes it easier to understand why the world is in a mess — cutthroat competition without the balancing force of Ahimsa soon becomes bloody battle that leaves us emotionally, physically, ethically, and socially barren. When we build Ahimsa into an organization’s cultures, values, and purpose — which guide and shape it’s everyday actions, plans, beliefs — then we are laying the true cornerstones of eudaimonia.

Anubhava is the highest kind of knowing in classical Hindu philosophy, which differentiates six kinds of knowing — a framework that I think even after millennia has never been bettered. Anubhava means intuitive, direct knowing — the first-hand experience of a thing (contrast it with the lowest kind, Sabda, which means relying on someone else’s verbal testimony, or general word-of-mouth, and you see the difference). Let’s think for a moment about how most organizations work: knowledge that grows more and more abstract is filtered upwards, until it reaches managers who have no pure experience of the organization’s real-world impact on people at all — only numbers, charts, and graphs. Those “data” are Sabda, not Anubhava. Consider Patagonia. It’s run by and for outdoors enthusiasts, who love nothing more than kissing the office goodbye and going on treks. That’s pure, direct experience, in a tiny way — kind of how the Undercover Boss discovers ugly truths he or she might never have known otherwise through graphs and pie charts. Without direct experience of the problems we are trying to solve, the issues we are trying to address, we cannot really hope to gain the empathy, creativity, and reality necessary to really elevate human possibility — numbers alone don’t tell us the truths of human lives — and for that reason Anubhava, direct experience of people’s suffering, challenges, obstacles, dreams, is a key design principle for eudaimonia.

Summum Bonum literally means “the highest good”: it’s Aristotle and Aquinas’ idea of what human action is there to accomplish. Here’s the catch. We’ve built the very opposite: a utilitarian instituional world which maximizes the idea of the greatest good for the greatest number. But the greatest good is often not much of a higher good at all: think American cable news versus the BBC. The greatest good asks us only to satisfy people’s appetites — whereas the highest good asks us to elevate people’s possibility. So Summum Bonum asks of us is whether our purpose is genuinely higher than being merely a utilitarian exercise in maximizing profits by gratifying the largest number of people right now — anyone, after all, can do that, and if we’re going to design organizations for eudaimonia, then we’ve got to do better. Let’s consider Blue Apron again: we might say that its Summum Bonum is healthier food, or better skills, or both. That’s a good that’s just a wee bit higher than the alternative — but at least it is a higher good. Or perhaps you think you think even that’s not quite high enough — good: either way, you’ve understood the Summum Bonum.

I could go on: there are more in the library that we’ve built — these are meant to give you just a flavour of eudaimonic design principles, and I think you’ve got it by now. If we decide to work together, we’ll explore them in greater depth and detail. Let’s expand outwards instead of just listing more principles. I’ve used very little, mundane examples here, to make the principles clearer. Let’s do a (much) larger one.

Britain’s NHS — the world’s first and still best public healthcare system — is high-Mu. I don’t have to think much: I walk to the doctor’s office, he sees me, we chat. It’s also a high-Ziran system: without it, my life would be suddenly transformed for the worse — life expectancy would probably fall, like it is in the US. It’s a high-Sunyata system, too: it helps people lose their little selves towards a greater purpose, health. And it’s a high-Arete system: I can use the system in many ways to become better at doing, whether losing weight, quitting smoking, and so on. So the NHS is a deeply eudaimonic system, that helps people live better lives. Because it’s high in Mu, Ziran, and Sunyata, it expands the boundaries of potential eudaimonia that can be realized. Does that mean it’s perfect? Of course not. What it is is vastly better at realizing human potential.

One last caveat. I’ve only discussed the design principles very incompletely and partially here — yet I emphatically don’t mean a superficial engagement with them. These ancient philosophies have much more powerful insights about living genuinely good lives than modern thought often does — what it all means, how it all fits together, and where it should all take us. So I mean really bringing the heart of these profound, beautiful ways of thinking into what we are doing, making, building, creating today — as jarring and uncomfortable and strange as they might seem. And maybe that sense of discomfort is necessary.

The old paradigm — maximizing income as the sole end of life — is at its end. To really spark genuinely good lives, I think the most pragmatic way forward is back: going back to the roots of human understanding about it, and bring into what we do a little bit of what the greatest minds in history knew. Their ideas, timeless and true, are the mightiest hammers we know of with which to cut the jewel of eudaimonia out of the the rough stone of human existence.

Umair