Thirdly, while I do tangentially agree that “happiness” can be found in being an Aristotelian “social animal,” the Aristotelian notions of
eudaimonia certainly involved a lot more than being a social animal and involved, for instance, both
intellectual and practical wisdom.
After I tell you who we are and what we do here at Top Comments, I’m going to say what I really think.
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I am a Black Gay man.
There is no doubt in my mind that people like the three authors of that New York Times piece would prefer to see me dead.
Or miserable.
I cannot afford to be confused about that.
The ideals of the very institutions that the authors cite— or at least the way in which the authors of that piece think of those ideals— “family, faith, and community,” all condemned me at some point in my life.
Forget pursuing happiness.
Representatives of those very institutions not only told me, in so many words, that I had no right to pursue happiness but that I also chose to pursue misery.
(For example, more than one of my family members told me that gay people were chronically unhappy and were, by and large, incapable of being happy and contented with their lives.)
It’s not even so much that these institutional representatives believe that or even that I believed it, at one point.
For me, it’s more about the sense of mistrust that I developed in all of these “institutions.”
The minimum requirement of “the pursuit of happiness” then became unlearning much of what I had been taught; taking what I needed and leaving the rest by the roadside.
And putting...something together that I could at least work with.
Nowadays, I would not describe myself as a “happy” person although I have happy moments.
But at least I can look at myself in the mirror and be OK without the more popular and traditional notions of “family, faith, and community.”
My own definitions of the terms work just fine for me.