Without at least some good things in it, life has no value. Some of those good things may be happiness, a meaningful legacy, a worthy purpose, outlandish success, or simply the joy of surviving, but meaning always requires experiencing at least some realization of an ideal. Without a derived purpose, a creature may be alive, but thriving as a human includes things beyond mere survival.
In a broad sense, “the good life” comes when we experience consistent meaning. While we can find meaning on a moment-by-moment basis, the good life is a lifestyle of meaning.
The good life is a model we build in our minds, then strive for above other things. All aspects of right conduct, role modeling, and leadership require a well-calibrated good life. The people who attained that way of life before us are worthy of our honor, and are the strongest source of wisdom we can ever possess in this life.
The good things that encompass the good life are the basis for all our morality.
Most of the conflicts come from limits we impose on others regarding those things we see lacking, as well as our responses to those limits.
One very heated philosophical debate worth considering is whether the good life consists in maximizing pleasure or minimizing pain. All decisions are a calculus, and many good decisions do both, but how we prioritize them determines how we reconcile most inner conflicts.
Reinforcement
Living well requires constant change and pushing against the resistance we experience around us. This requires a type of “comfort” in unpleasant things that serve us well in the long term.
We must associate with others who share our values, whether it’s in finding friendship or associating with (and sometimes leading) groups. This should express as a love for oneself and others, not merely for the sake of gaining power.
We must also be authentic with what we say and do. Honesty with ourselves is critical to keeping ourselves connected closely to reality, and is critical to simplifying reality to permit our intuitions to develop a strong understanding of what we learn.
Humor
Humor is a necessity for the good life, since it alleviates pain.
There is no room for fanaticism in the good life, since it doesn’t permit humor.
However, the good life may have room for obsession, depending on someone’s personality and the context. This should still account for the time and place of a person’s appropriate behavior, however.
Growth
Over the course of a lifetime, a good life will have a progressive upward cycle that merges a person’s identity with their actions. This requires associating closely to what we do, but shifting with limits to avoid addictions as diminishing return takes hold.
The quality of a person could probably be most clearly measured by how much they change to conform to their understanding of the good life. This could be expanded to include how much they improve their understanding when reality demonstrates its results to their decisions.
The good life has a broader application than merely attaining comfort. Our decisions are only responses to our environment, so an environment filled with extremes will most likely yield the best possible life:
- Understanding the beauty of peace can only come after experiencing war.
- Living under injustice teaches us more wholly about justice.
- Wealth can only be appreciated the most by someone who has been poor.
- Joy only gives its fullness through experiencing sorrow.
The good life, therefore, is constantly changing to give us context for the stories we build from our environment.
Of course, those stories should probably have happy endings. Unfortunately, death takes us all, and we don’t know what happens after that, so complete closure for us or for those who survive us is very limited without myths of the world beyond this one.
How
We could live a good life without extremes, but our lives are short enough that we won’t experience life fast enough to attain it without having a proper upbringing and training in it. Thus, to gain the greatest understanding of the right way to live, we must overshoot it in every possible direction that it may arrive.
The entire idea of “moderation in all things” is a bit oversimplified since we must define “moderate”, but it represents a few combined concepts:
- All actions and ideas have their time and place.
- We can’t live with addictions or excess.
- There’s never a universal solution to our wide variety of purposes.
However, we need a bit more than merely “moderation”:
- Routinely, we should stop mid-action and consider our purposes for our routines and habits. Otherwise, we’ll be stuck doing things that don’t conform to our purposes. Philosophers constantly ask seemingly inane questions to this end, but anyone can do it by just slowing down.
- We must be free of past trauma guiding our purposes. The past only exists in our minds, so external force won’t affect how we feel about the past nearly as much as introspection.
- We must stay optimistic about the future, or we’ll submit to our fears. But, reality is often terrifying. The easiest way to do this is by finding gratitude over all things through observation, including life itself, but can also come through lowering expectations. Most people require religious habits to attain that optimism.
- Finally, we must avoid pettiness whenever we can. We’re all born petty because we feel everything so strongly in our experience. Not everyone must be a philosopher, but we must avoid letting our feelings and focus swing from one trend to the next to prevent subjecting ourselves to needless conflicts and distorting how we understand reality.
We should be driven by standards, not opposition to something else. The standards themselves have their source of authority, so we must know what that standard is and whether we want to submit to it.
We can only attain self-regulation through a specific procedure:
- Closely assess how and where everything sits in relationship to ourselves.
- Find out why certain things are certain, and why we must do anything about them.
- Apply virtue appropriately for the situation.
The evidence that a life is well-lived comes from several simultaneous conditions:
- The purposes of that person were legitimately moral.
- The person who experienced it found meaning by the very end of it.
- That person has released any resentment or bitterness from the pain of their experience.
- Other people found meaning in that person’s experience.
Whether society considers this a worthy endeavor is another matter entirely.
Application
To discern the quality of what a person really is, don’t look at where they are, but instead look at where they’ve come from and how far they’ve come.
Having sophistication can give us a broader understanding of society, but it’s not necessary to live well because it may go against how we wish to identify. We would do better to integrate our shadow than pretend we don’t have one.
Often, if we’ve changed from one thing to another, it’s difficult for us to change back if we discover the original was better. We’ll typically feel we’ve wasted our life with the second thing and feel tremendous shame from it. However, it was a necessary journey because we needed to fail with the second thing to understand the benefits of the first. But, many people simply reprogram their beliefs to accommodate their shame.
At certain times, every person must be the following:
- An artist who creates something.
- A warrior who fights something.
- A philosopher who seeks to understand something.
- A laborer who builds something.
Transforming ourselves is far more important, and longer-lasting, than transforming society. After all, transforming society is simply transforming other people, and people mostly learn by example.
There’s not much value in following a cynical person, but we can learn plenty about what is good by what that cynic was still optimistic or certain about.
A well-lived life is more significant than being well-received by others or possessing many things. In fact, it’s also lower-maintenance: both reputation and possessions require much more work to maintain than a wealth of experiences.
Everyone near the end of a well-lived life will have the following:
- Has experienced facing and overcoming their fears.
- Has opposed something significantly immoral.
- Accomplished something that gave them tremendous meaning.
- Enjoyed themselves when they had nothing to do.
- Knows how to cope with death.
Use the Five-Minute Favor Rule: always help someone if you can fulfill their need within 5 minutes.