Link Between Work And A Meaningful Life

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their work.
We could thus estimate that any work with an element of honor in it also brings happiness and meaning. Such professions in today's terms could be the medical professions such as nursing, or the educational professions such as teaching. People in such professions attain honor by giving unselfishly of their resources and their energy to help and to heal.

1. Nicomachean Ethics, p. 31.30.

Honor can thus be attained by being unselfish in one's profession. This then brings about the satisfaction experienced when having helped others unselfishly. This is a rather more noble motive for working than the usual motive of getting a job to get money. Aristotle also considers this issue in his Nichomachean Ethics [2].
Making money as an activity in itself is not the pursuit of good. Instead the human pursuit is for the things that money brings them. So just having a job to make a living is essentialy meaningless. Many people over the centuries have held jobs just to ...

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person happy. Thus a the function or the profession that human beings engage them could also make them happy and give them a profound sense of meaning. To derive pleasure from fulfilling a function in life is the goal of a profession. Focussing on making money from a profession, without any other considerations, only serves to bring misery. This is what Aristotle has in mind when he says:

"Happiness then is the best and noblest and pleasantest thing in the world." [3]

And he is right, but he also admits that some material things are necessary to bring about such happiness. One could for example not easily be happy if one has no money whatsoever. This is the function of money; ...

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