Athens: a good life, before the fieldwork

On 3 July I fly to Athens. I’ll be there for three weeks, taking a proper look at what a good life looks like there – told by the people living it.

I’m starting here for two reasons.

Because Athens is where the good life first got its name. Eudaimonia – Aristotle’s word for a life well lived – was worked out here thousands of years ago.

Much of that thinking happened in the agora, the public square where people gathered to talk over how to live. Which is what a coffeetalk is: people meeting over coffee to work out what a good life looks like. Same idea, smaller setting. I’ve leaned on Athens’ vocabulary for years and never once set foot in the place.

And because Athens also knows the other side. For a decade it was the face of an economic crisis. The debt piled up, jobs disappeared, and a generation left to find work elsewhere. GDP collapsed – and people were left with the questions money had been quietly answering for them. How to get through. Who you are when success stops being something you can count.

There’s a quieter reason as well. My mother studied philosophy, and as a teenager I read my way through the books she’d kept from university – the Iliad first, then Plato, then further in, into the Greeks who argued over what a good life was made of. I didn’t follow all of it. But I ran the thought experiments in my head, and some of those questions never left me. I’m curious to stand where they were first asked.

What I think I know

Here’s what I think before I land. I’ll be wrong about some of it. That’s the point.

I think Athens will be the most natural coffeetalk city I’ve found. Greeks treat a single coffee as an afternoon. A freddo – the iced espresso that runs the Greek summer – can hold a table for hours. My method depends on people willing to sit and talk, and Athens has been sitting and talking over coffee longer than I’ve been alive.

I think the warmth will be real and the bureaucracy will be worse than the warmth. I expect to hear about philotimo – duty, honour, doing right by others – and about parea, the close group of friends you spend your time with.

And I think there’s a harder thread underneath. The young people who left, and the ones who stayed. Whether you can build a life in Athens or only visit one. A city can be lovely to spend time in and brutal to live in. Those are not the same city, and quality of life lives in the gap between them.

What I’m going to do about it

I’m not going to confirm the postcard – the sunlit, easy version of Greek life everyone already pictures. That part is easy.

I’ll sit with residents, founders and the people holding bits of the city together, and ask the four questions I always ask – whether Athens lets you Live Good, Work Good, Feel Good and Do Good – then listen for where the answers don’t match the brochure.

The plan for July is simple. Coffeetalks through the early weeks. A first written picture of how Athens is doing around the middle of the month, once I’ve heard enough to say something honest. Then a connecting phase – putting people who should know each other in the same room, so the ones with a problem meet the ones who can help solve it.

Come and have a coffee

If you’re in Athens this July, or you know someone who should be part of this, come and have a coffee. No pitch. No slides. A freddo and an hour, and an honest conversation about whether the city lets you live a good life.

These are my perceptions before I’ve set foot in the city. I’m writing them down so Athens can correct them. – I arrive with a theory, and the people who live there take it apart.

Two and a half thousand years ago this city taught the rest of us how to ask what a good life is. I’m coming to find out whether it still has a good answer.