A Theory of General Well-Being

How Human Flourishing is Generated Through the Pursuit of Meaning

In times of crisis, the inevitable suffering of life makes a mockery of the notion that the purpose of life is to chase happiness.

Office in a Small City by Edward Hopper, 1953. This piece has always made me feel introspective and alone (in a peaceful way).

The maximization of positive emotions as the means to the end goal of achieving well-being is deeply flawed because it sees suffering as an anomaly that must be resolved rather than the natural condition of life; as a result, mainstream positive psychology attempts to improve the human condition by focusing on the removal of suffering instead of transforming it.

If the condition of life is to suffer, the meaning of life is to do what is meaningful to us despite this condition: it is not the maximization of positive emotions that produces well-being, but undergoing purposeful hardship and making worthy sacrifices. 

“What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for some goal worthy of him. W…