I continued reading the book "Life on Purpose". I am fascinated by the stories and the analogies described by the author. Do you know that "Aristotle", the name of the famous ancient Greek philosopher, actually means "best purpose"?
The same philosopher posed one of the big philosophical questions of mankind: What is the ultimate purpose of human activity? He further concluded that the ultimate purpose of human activity is happiness. I'm sure that in his era, there was no way and no effort was made to test his assertion scientifically.
Consider that there are two kinds of happiness. One was defined by those old philosophers as Eudaimonic (maybe defined as "the highest human good") and the other Hedonic (pleasure or the pursue of it). Over the past decade, scientists have begun studying the impact of hedonia and eudaimonia on our health and well-being. That's right, they are exploring one of the big questions for human being.
The basic theory is this, we human respond to stressful conditions with more agents and antibodies (good for us) or with inflammation (bad for us). The type of response would vary between individuals. The newest research results found that in the blood samples of their tested participants who scored high on the hedonic scale were far more likely to have inflammatory gene expression and decreased genes expression involved in antibody and antiviral response. whereas participants scored high on eudaimonic scale had the opposite pattern of expression. In other words, participants with greater eudaimonia were physiologically healthier.
It was not only the fun stories, nor the humorous writing style that interested me, although they make the book more fun to read. It was as if I was in an uncharted territory with the knowledge and opinions that refreshed my mind!
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