Eudaimonia with Dialog+
Enjoying a Good Life with Hemodialysis
Meet Sebastian Schaffer
Nutritionist, Naturalist, Teacher, ESRD patient, Father and Home factotum
Hi! Welcome to my website & blog.
My name is Sebastian Schaffer. I have more than fourteen years of experience in academia, with special expertise in the field of nutritional neuroscience research and teaching. In April 2019, a chronic kidney disease (CKD) - diagnosed in 2012 - finally turned into kidney failure requiring regular hemodialysis.
Before moving to the Philippines in 2014, I worked for more than 6 years in an international research team at NUS in Singapore. I currently reside with my family and our four Askal dogs in the Calabarzon region of the Philippines.
I am a graduate (nutritional sciences) of Justus Liebig-University, Giessen, Germany. In 2006, I successfully completed the European Nutrition Leadership Program (ENLP) in Luxembourg.
For more information on my professional career, please see my LinkedIn profile.
Got interested? Read more stories about my journey, hemodialysis is general, good food and much more on my blog!
Why the title "Eudaimonia with Dialog+"
I first came across the concept of 'eudaimonia' in the book 'The Mind', edited by John Brockman (2011).
Here, Martin Seligman (Director of the Penn Positive Psychology Center, Zellerbach Family Professor of Psychology in the Penn Department of Psychology) published a short essay entitled 'Eudaemonia - The Good Life'.
According to the Philosophy Terms website, in Greek philosophy, Eudaimonia means achieving the best conditions possible for a human being, in every sense–not only happiness, but also virtue, morality, and a meaningful life.
Seligman concludes his essay with the following statement: 'There will likely be a pharmacology of pleasure, and there may be a pharmacology of positive emotion generally, but it is unlikely there'll be an interesting pharmacology of flow. And it's impossible that there'll be a pharmacology of meaning.'
I have been intrigued by this statement ever since I came across it about eight years ago. Having worked in basic research for many years, I think I have a good understanding of what science and technology can achieve. For all my adult life I had a pragmatic, yet optimistic view on the coexistence of man and machine. Funny enough, this has not changed now that my life depends to 100 percent on the well-functioning of a machine (Dialog+, my hemodialysis system). The opposite is true. Yet, I always wondered where the limitations of technology are. After two days in darkness (when I received the news of requiring hemodialysis and my first dialysis session), I decided that pursuing a good life (and not necessarily happiness - but more on this in a later blog entry) should be the founding principle of the remaining years of my life. For this I need (at least at the moment), Dialog+ (my hemodialysis system) to which I developed a kind of affection with all its tubes, buttons and different beeping sounds.
