Once you reach a certain age, the overarching goals of life change. When you’re young, your goals are (or should be) very grand. Depending upon who you are and how you’ve been influenced by the world around you, your aims in life might include achievement, power, wealth, fame, true love, that sort of thing. Maybe even happiness. However, after a decade or two, most people get rounded down (although a few do get on that elevator to the top and keep on chasing a dream — for better and for worse). Their goals start changing to contentedness, self-actualization, raising a family, and perhaps achieving religious salvation or transcendence. Then as you get older, it becomes mostly day-to-day survival, with an occasional attempt at “passing something on” or “helping to prepare the next generation” (despite the fact that the next generation mostly doesn’t want any help; never did, never will).

I think that I’ve found a more generic concept for whatever it is that we should be doing with our lives, no matter what our age and situation. It’s called “eudaimonia”, and it goes back to Aristotle and the ancient Greeks (it means something like “spirit of good being” or “human flourishing”). It’s kind of a generic notion of “being in synch”, about finding the best balance between your own authentic self and the world around you. It’s all about finding wisdom and acting virtuously for all the days of your life. It’s a hard concept to nail down – almost as hard as actually living in a eudaimonious way.

But hey, ya gotta keep tryin’.

ALSO – speaking of happiness, I see that the US military is quite happy about its successful missile shot at the NRO spy satellite that was going to come down soon. However, the purported reason behind the mission is starting to look just about as valid as President Bush’s reasons for invading Iraq (remember the supposed “weapons of mass destruction”?). Last night on the PBS Newshour, MIT science professor and defense critic Theodore Postol said that he did an analysis of the degree of force that the satellite in question would experience when it started hitting the upper atmosphere (had it not been shot down). He felt that the high degree of sudden force, combined with the twisting and tumbling the satellite would experience and the high temperatures of re-entry, would surely burst the tank holding the toxic hydrazine propellant, dispersing it well before the remains of the satellite got close to the ground. He described the construction of such tanks as “gossamer”, i.e. very lightweight (given that the rockets that launch these satellites can only carry so much, and the designers would rather have more cameras and electronic stuff than thick tank walls).

Sooooooo ….. another Bush Administration pro-military excuse goes down the tubes.