Why the Things You Want Won’t Make You Happy | Aquinas on the False Paths to Happiness

What if you got everything you wanted and discovered that none of it was enough? Money. Success. Recognition. Fame. Power. Health. Pleasure. Achievement. More than seven hundred years ago, Thomas Aquinas asked a question that remains as urgent today as it was in the Middle Ages: *What can actually make a human being happy?* In this episode of *The Examined Life*, we walk through Aquinas’s remarkable investigation of the things people most commonly pursue as the key to happiness. Aquinas does not argue that money, health, pleasure, achievement, or recognition are bad. Quite the opposite. They are genuine goods. The problem begins when we ask a limited good to give us unlimited happiness. We’ll examine why Aquinas rejects: • Wealth • Honor • Fame • Power • Bodily goods and health • Pleasure • Even the highest goods of the soul And we’ll see why Aquinas ultimately concludes that no finite good can completely satisfy the human desire for the good. The lesson is not that we should stop loving the good things of this life. It is that we must learn to love them in the right order. **These things are not too small to be loved. They are too small to be loved as God.** The Examined Life *Philosophy for Real People* VITA EXAMINATA