Dig through the archives of literature, philosophy and art and you will find hundreds of phrases for it. Plato called it the good life, and Aristotle referred to human flourishing. The Bible talks about it as being blessed, and the Declaration of Independence refers to the pursuit of happiness.

Human beings have a unique problem. We do not know exactly how to be good human beings. We wake in the morning, and unlike animals that are driven by instinct, it’s not always immediately apparent what best to do with ourselves.

Into this void, every society in human history has offered one or more answers as to what constitutes the good life. We have venerated great warriors who defended their tribe or city from attack. We have celebrated thinkers and scientists who have discovered new truths about the world.

In the twenty-first century West, our cultural conversations about the good life are dominated by the quest for wealth and celebrity. As a general rule, we all aspire to be rich and famous, because of the many subtle and not-so-subtle ways that our culture reinforces the belief that wealth and celebrity are the ingredients of the good life. Most people spend the greater part of their working lives in the pursuit of money.

Yet there is scant evidence even in our own culture that wealth and fame bring happiness, let alone guaranteeing their possessors anything approaching human flourishing. A cursory reading of even non-sensational accounts of the lives of those that have achieved what our society holds out as the hope of human existence suggests that at best, the rich and famous are no happier than the rest of us, and possibly much less so. Likewise our societies, which have accumulated the greatest material wealth of any in history, do not seem to have achieved an equivalent rise in overall happiness. We are embarrassingly stressed, depressed and unhappy.

We need to acknowledge that this exposes a deep problem in our culture. It is possible that our belief is wrong – that in limiting our pursuit of happiness to the pursuit of material prosperity, for all its many benefits (disclosure: this article was typed on a computer), we have wandered down a dead end in the pursuit of what it means to be human.