Written over the course of the Spring 2026 semester and recorded on a Tascam Portastudio in my home office, this seven-song collection approaches happiness through the lens of authentic and meaningful existence. Influenced by the ancient and contemporary texts we encountered in Susan Rinard’s Happiness class, my working concept of happiness is "the virtue of being well." This view emphasizes one’s embeddedness in, and relation to, one’s environment (social and natural; hence the album cover featuring my name rendered in satellite imagery).

The seven-track album/EP begins by establishing that while happiness is ultimately up to the individual, it is achieved through the ways we relate to other people.

“Condemned to be Free” draws on Sartre’s existentialism. Authenticity demands that we embrace the crushing responsibility of our choices: “you want somebody willing to own you, but they’re not / you are condemned to be free.” Radical freedom only becomes an intelligible “self” through intersubjective tension and being seen by the Other; our self-conception is therefore inextricably linked to other people. The song also references bad faith (“when you’ve been a friend you wouldn’t trust yourself”), the self-deception that denies our freedom by blaming others. Its opposite, what we might call Sartrean happiness, involves willing the freedom of others and thereby fully embracing our own.

“Before You Fell” explores the temptation to find happiness by returning to an idealized past. Inspired by Plato’s emphasis on aligning oneself with ideal Forms and his nostalgic longing for a perfect otherworldly realm, the song asks whether rational reflection and recollection of a better time (to which we might one day return) can bring happiness. However, fixating on a heavenly ideal risks ignoring and overlooking the possibility of happiness in this imperfect life.

“Come Away From It” shifts the focus to finding inner stability amid external chaos, without necessarily invoking an eternal other world. Drawing on Epictetus’s dichotomy of control, the song asserts that even when “fate [has] its way with [us],” we retain power over our responses: “Feelings control you, or you control them.” Resilience comes from stepping back from what is not up to us.

“Death Is Nothing to Me” confronts the finality of death (Epicurus) while offering a critique of hedonism in its various forms (Bentham, Mill, and Epicureanism). The verses highlight the difficulty of pursuing pleasure and avoiding pain (“Absence of pain could be felt in a dream / If not for the bane insomnia of my being”), while the chorus shifts to parallel major to affirm Epicurus’s famous line. Basing happiness primarily on pleasure ultimately limits meaning to oneself as the horizon of value; complete absence of pain is only achievable in death, which we cannot experience.

“Could It Be?” questions whether there is even an autonomous self to make happy. It weaves together ancient Indian and East Asian ideas: we are different iterations of the same underlying reality (Upanishads), that reality is ultimately ungraspable (Daoism), and we are empty of independent essence (“could it be so empty”—Buddhism’s doctrine of emptiness/śūnyatā). Liberation arises through detachment and letting go. Embracing radical interconnectedness also points toward Robin Wall Kimmerer’s idea of mutual flourishing.

“Divine Play” explicitly references the Hindu concept of līlā: life as the playful drama of the divine. Our suffering and identities are modes of this cosmic entertainment. Happiness comes from wholeheartedly embracing one’s role in the play: “Write yourself into this tragedy / A life worth dying for, joyfully.” Rather than an otherworldly purpose (as in Plato), divinity is immanent within lived experience. This resonates with Dan Haybron’s notion of attunement: psychic affirmation is possible even amid suffering when we see our toils as part of a larger cosmic dance.

The album closes with “For Its Own Sake,” a celebration of virtue ethics (Aristotle and Nussbaum). Fulfilling one’s function means being fully authentic: “I’m doing the best I can, being all that I am.” Authentic activity is pursued “for its own sake,” and positive feelings are merely a byproduct. This moves from mere psychological subjective well-being to something like objective flourishing. As Aristotle argues, eudaimonia (happiness/flourishing) is the only true end in itself. This final track synthesizes the preceding explorations into a call to action—happiness as the virtue of being well.