We have outsourced enormous chunks of what used to generate eudaimonia to machines.

We value what we build with our own hands more than equivalent objects we simply acquire.

Hybrid intelligence is holistic understanding of our natural abilities and our artificial capacities.

Even before Socrates sat down in the marketplace and started interrogating people about it, humans have been wondering about happiness. “What makes me feel good tonight?” is relatively easy to answer. The harder question underneath: “What makes my life worth living?”

Aristotle separated these two deliberately. On one side, hedonia—pleasure, comfort, the satisfaction of appetite. On the other, eudaimonia—a word we awkwardly translate as "happiness" but that really means something closer to flourishing, to becoming fully what you are capable of being. The distinction mattered to him. It still should matter to us. Because in 2026, for the first time in human history, we have outsourced enormous chunks of what used to generate eudaimonia—creativity, the slow construction of something—to machines that do it faster and, increasingly often, better.

What does that do to us, individually and as a species?

Old Definitions That Still Hold True

For most of recorded history, meaning was found in struggle that had a shape. You plant. You wait. You harvest. The wait and sweat were part of the meaning. The medieval stonemason carving an arch in a cathedral would never see completed the fruit of his labor, and yet, by most measures available to us, he was living with purpose. Viktor Frankl, writing amid some of the darkest........

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