What is a good life and how do we achieve it?

There is more to well-being – leading a good and successful life – than feeling happy and getting what we want. Antti Kauppinen’s hypothesis is that we also need to take on worthwhile challenges and do things that give our lives meaning. He will now establish an interdisciplinary center to study the foundations of well-being.

For politicians to be able to make good decisions and for us to be able to understand our own lives, we need to have better tools for analyzing how we achieve wellbeing: good health, feelings of well-being and happiness.

Dr. Antti Kauppinen at the University of Tampere, Finland, believes that the methods that are currently used to measure well-being or a good life are too arbitrary and too focused on perceived feelings of happiness. People are complex beings who also need to enrich their lives with meaningful actions that can form a positive life history in order to feel good. For example, when we take on an important challenge and succeed we deserve to be proud and improve our self-esteem, which are both necessary for deep happiness.

Antti Kauppinen will establish a center with an interdisciplinary research group that will investigate this perspective on what a good life is. Better insights in this area will enrich philosophy and may also influence everything from how medical committees make decisions to how politicians think when they conduct social reforms. As a Wallenberg Academy Fellow, Antti Kauppinen will work at the University of Gothenburg. 

Photo: Marcus Marcetic