8.8.11

Is a Well-Lived Life Worth Anything?


We are the creators of the future. Because we are the inheritors of a tradition not just older — but more humanistic, constructive, nuanced, dynamic, and perhaps just a little bit wiser — than we know. A good life today? It's been vacantly reduced to the frenzied sport of buying "consumer goods" — more, bigger, faster, cheaper, now. But the foundational idea that ignited the art of human organization in the first place just might have been eudaimonia — and today's opulence is just its clumsy, hurried streetside caricature, empty of depth, shorn of meaning, bereft of the essence of what make us human, void of the hunger to create a better world for humanity. Somewhere along the way, sometime on the journey — perhaps for the best of reasons — we lost it. Let's get it back.

Umair Haque - Harvard Business Review