3 Things I Learned About a Better Life from 3 Weeks in Greece

What Ancient Greeks Perfected That We All Need Today

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On a sweltering, 100-degree day in mid-July, I was standing in the middle of the ancient city of Athens alongside John Camp. Having first stood in this site as a student nearly 60 years ago, Camp went on to earn a B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. from Harvard and has spent the last 55 years as part of the excavation team at the American School of Classical Studies in Athens, including the last 30 years as director.

“On days like this, ancient Athenians would gather right in this spot under a long, covered colonnade,” he explained. “Plato would have been here, as well as Socrates. Later there was an entire school of philosophers who took their name from this building. The building is called a stoa, which is how those philosophers became the Stoics.”

I spent three glorious weeks in and around Athens this summer. My daughters had internships; my wife hosted events for entrepreneurs around the world (and interviewed the prime minister on the banks of the Acropolis). And I, well, immersed myself in Ancient Greece—meeting archaeologists, visiting historic sites, and reading some of the canon of the classical world.

What struck me time and again was how a place so small—Greece today has only 25,000 square miles and is smaller than Scotland, Portugal, and all but 10 U.S. states—could have an impact on the world that’s so mammoth. And so lasting. Not a day goes by when anyone in the West is not profoundly shaped by the events on the shores of the Northern Mediterranean in the first millennium B.C.E., from democracy to philosophy to theater to architecture.

Here, from my summer in the shadows of the Parthenon, are three things I learned about how to live better from three weeks in Greece:

Photo credit Iryna Chubarova from Getty Images via Canva

1. Curiosity

If American history is defined in many ways by its massive, largely isolated land mass, Greek history is defined by its deep, abiding connection to the water. As Edith Hall writes in her wonderful book, Introducing the Ancient Greeks, “Ancient Greeks hardly ever settled more than 25 miles—a day’s walk—from the sea.”

As Plato put it, Greeks chose to live “like frogs or ants around the pond.”

This constant exposure not just to sea, salt, water, and wind but also to trade, outsiders, and different cultures meant that the Greeks were remarkably curious. As Hall puts it, “The sail on a ship represents not only the understanding of the behavior of an elemental force of nature (“pure” science) but its practical application (“applied” science.).” In fact, the Greek sail, dating from the second century B.C.E., is the earliest known human device that harnesses a non-animal fore to provide energy.

Curiosity was so powerful a cultural value to the Greeks that it almost killed Odysseus—twice!—first when he decided to explore the Cyclopes, then when he decided to visit the Sirens.

Why did he take such risks? Because this most Greek—and most enduring—of heroes understood that there is no growth without learning and there is no humanity without curiosity. Have you taken the time to be curious about some unexpected topic this summer?

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2. Openness

No doubt it was the Greeks’ own small surroundings—as well as their effortless access to the rest of the known world—that led to their embracing of travel. Even more remarkably, they believed they couldn’t understand the world without the help of others. In a word, they were remarkably open. In particular, they welcomed the notion that every idea had a counter idea that was worth exploring.

Empedocles, the 5th-century philosopher, said the world was dominated by twin forces—love and strife. Pythagoras, the 5th-century mathematician who had great influence on Plato and Socrates, created a “table of opposites” through which he sought to teach his students that light was always accompanied by dark, odd with even, right with wrong. Everything has a pole, and to understand a phenomenon in the world meant to appreciate the “unity of opposites.”

For me, encountering this openness to opposition at a moment when our own world seems bent on the counter approach—demonizing difference, dehumanizing antagonists—was startling. Obviously, the Greeks had enemies—both from without and within. But one of their most enduring contributions to Western thought is their appreciation of what others might contribute to a culture. As Pericles, the great democratic statesman and visionary behind the Parthenon who delivered his famed 5th-century funeral oration a few steps from where my family was living, said, “We throw open our city to the world, and never expel a foreigner or prevent him from seeing or learning anything.”

Can our great democracy still say that?

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3. Storytelling

But no quality of Ancient Greece comes through most clearly—and reminds us more robustly about the essence of what it means to live a meaningful life—than their full-throttle embrace of storytelling. It might be too much to say the Greeks invented storytelling as a national trait—the Israelites had been doing a good job of that for centuries, right alongside Homer and the many oral performers who shared the Iliad and Odyssey.

But the Greeks surely committed to it. Their buildings tell stories. Their sculptures tell stories. Even their stories tell stories. Thucydides perfected poetry as a psychological tool; Herodotus introduced history as a narrative of remembrance; Sophocles elevated tragedy to a collective purging. As Gorgias, a pre-Socratic philosopher from the 4th century, said, words were a form of enchantment that could abduct the human soul.

The Greeks showed that stories were not just passing flights of fancy; they were essential personal necessities—and meaningful national experiences.

They ensured that storytelling would forever be part of the DNA of being alive.

Perhaps the most enduring idea the Greeks emphasized was the importance of living with joy. As early as the 5th century, philosophers like Democritus were arguing that happiness was the ideal state and it could be achieved not by property and wealth but by contemplation and soul. Happiness is not something you find, but something you make. And three tools are as powerful as any: curiosity, openness, and storytelling.

Don’t let them be Greek to you. Go forth and use one today.

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Thank you for reading The Nonlinear Life. Please help us grow the community by subscribing, sharing, and commenting below. Also, you can learn more about me, read my introductory post, watch my latest TED Talk, or scroll through my other posts. And if you'd like to do a storytelling project with a loved one similar to the one I did with my father, click here to learn more.

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Or check out my books that inspired this newsletter: Life Is in the Transitions and The Secrets of Happy Families.

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