How to live a Good Life?

I believe a Good Life is a life with Meaning, Flow, Autonomy, Competence, Relatedness, Benevolence, and Self Mastery. This might sound like a lot of responsibility and even causes for stress so I would add an element of “Do not worry!” in the Good Life. Do your best and hope for a better future, then let the chips fall where they may because it is out of your control at that point.

We are all given life when we are born. This bestows upon us one simple responsibility — to live. Just by being alive we have an experience and with that comes a responsibility to make the most out of that experience — at least to me that seems to be the rational starting point. This optimization of experience is what I call the search for a Good Life — or rather the living of a Good Life. Since I am here and I have experiences that I want to make the most of, I must try to make the most out of them.

At first, I thought of this as a weight on my existence; forced thought about what experiences do I enjoy, what effects do my actions have on others and the list goes on… In Finnish we say “Tieto lisää tuskaa” which roughly translates into knowledge increases suffering — or the opposite of ignorance is bliss. Only because I’m alive and aware of this I am forced into action! Being dead or an idle spectator would be easier in the sense that there would be no need for action. However, that is not the case, because, in my experience, the best experiences are the ones that are truly meaningful for myself and they always involved (mental or physical) action; so here I am pondering what I deem to be a Good Life and leading it accordingly.

Before diving into what I believe are the important aspects of a Good Life, I want to start with the most important coping mechanism I have developed for living: Don’t worry! Life is chaotic and dynamic in unforeseeable ways so worrying about the past, present or future will only take energy from what I could be doing instead. This ties into Daoism, Buddhism and Zen philosophy; following The Way of life, going with the flow so to speak. Things will happen, I will change, my interests are in constant flux and the future is unknown. I can and should do my best to take action and steer the direction of my life towards the good but not worrying about it is essential. Whenever you worry you miss the enjoyment of being in the present and that is ultimately all there is, right now. Do fantasize, have goals and plan for the future but don’t worry about them — be here and The Way will lead where it leads. In essence, do your best but don’t worry about it.

Onto the important aspects, first of all, I am convinced that a good life has to have meaning. The universe is beyond our scope and arguably doesn’t care about a speck of dust like the human race so the only meaning I can rationalize for myself should come from within. Even more so, each human being, myself included, must come up with their own meaning for it to have personal power, energy, and goodness.

Secondly, I believe we have somewhat of a good roadmap of what to do — it has been said by many wise men in history but there is a concise one-liner from the Finnish philosopher Frank Martela that I think illustrates the point: “Do things that are meaningful to you that are also meaningful to others”. Sounds simple enough — but how to find out what that meaning is? [1]

To expand upon this roadmap I think Self-Determination Theory serves a good purpose. To live a meaningful life there are a few components that are a good guide in the search for meaning and the Good Life. These are Autonomy, Competence, Relatedness and additionally according to Frank Martela, Benevolence. I can relate to these four and have seen similar thinking frameworks in different religions, philosophies and ways of thought — that is why I describe them here and add my own interpretations and thoughts to them — because I believe there is truth in them.

1. Autonomy

We are alone in life, whether we believe it or not. There is only you in your experience — your mind cannot be shared with others, only through physical contact and words are we able to communicate our experience — but not share it. With this in mind, you should be in control of your own life and at the very least have the belief that you can affect your experience and actions. It has been shown that when people get to make their own decisions (they are autonomous), the motivation to follow up and execute those decisions is much stronger. Arguably, because they have more personal meaning when the individual has a sense of freedom of action.

1. Competence

The belief that you can achieve your goals and be competent is essential — if you believe you can do and achieve your fantasies and goals the future becomes a brilliant wonderland of opportunities. If the future is bright, then also the present is good. The book Homo Prospectus argues this well in one passage:

“Certainly, it is depressing for people to believe that they are no good, that the world is no good, and that this will always be the case. In contrast, if people think that they are no good and that the world is no good, but that this will change dramatically for the better tomorrow, this is not nearly as disheartening”. [2]

So the message here is, you don’t have to be competent today but rather believe that you can be competent in the future, basically that you can learn things. I believe the only way to achieve this sort of belief is by doing and simultaneously learning by doing.

1. Relatedness

Having real close relationships with other people in your life. Close friends and family are key, people you love to hang out with and you don’t have to put up any mask to be approved.

1. Benevolence

“Give and you shall receive”. It feels good to be of service to other people, to be kind and helpful. The idea being that by helping others you are actually helping yourself to a better life as well. We are social beings and empathy is a strong emotion that allows us to thrive through helping others.

Now, with these four tools as a compass to add more meaning to life we are equipped to start exploring and searching for things that fit into these categories. Especially as a young adult (I’m 24 as of writing this) it is simple to find out how can I set up my life to have meaning which is my own. Prospection, action (testing), retrospection and more iterations of this until I find enough meaningful things to fill my days — that will, in turn, lead to a Good Life. An example of the four would be:

1. Take time to get to know myself through meditation and introspection, explore my mind and practice awareness
2. Create something meaningful or learn a new skill
3. Truly open up with the close people in my life — family, partner and friends.
4. Share what I believe to be good to others

It really seems to be that simple. There are deeper meta layers to this simplicity though — what is good? What does it mean to find good things that are meaningful to others? As a reminder why I’m asking these questions about goodness I would refer to Aristotle who says it better than I ever could:

“We are not studying in order to know what virtue is, but to become good, for otherwise there would be no profit in it” [3]

The purpose of this essay and these ponderings is not to know what is good but to actually help me act in a good way to become good. We are not born a certain way — we are honed by habit to the character we become.

So in order to answer these types of deeper questions, we need some sort of ethical framework that guides thinking and acting in every waking moment. I believe Aristotle’s virtue ethics framework is an excellent one for this reason: it poses a simple way to answer difficult questions.

Virtue ethics is this: finding the mean or the golden middle way as some call it. Excessive or defective action has destructive results. So it is with virtues as well — you become a coward by always fleeing and fearing everything — likewise you become rash by having no fear and meeting every danger. In this case, real courage is found in the middle; and finding the middle you need to understand the extremes. This, Aristotle argues, goes for all virtues, like temperance, strength, and honesty. I fully agree and then to answer a question as, is something good, I would simply explore the extremes — does it cause excessive negativity or is it too good and causes excessive indulgence? For example, social media algorithms might currently be too good at producing content for me and making me addicted and over-consuming media — by using virtue ethics as a framework I can see this as an extreme and change my behavior more towards the mean.

Now what is important to understand is that good does not only mean what feels good in the normal hedonistic sense of the term. Something can be good also by being of virtuous excellence. For example being autonomous, competent and benevolent might not always feel good but it can be meaningful and good nonetheless. This, I believe, is what a Good Life should be in the pursuit of — true goodness. This is where Self Mastery comes in, actually being able to follow through on your intentions and not eat the chocolate cake when you know it’s not truly good for you. Of course, all this is easier said than done — living life according to what I have proposed here is no easy task and it’s a learning process — arguably one that takes a lifetime to perfect. However, don’t worry too much! Remember virtue ethics and the mean; a little hedonism is all right as long as you don’t overdo it.

References:

[1] Frank Martela TedX talk on the meaning of life https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rdKBZbTCVFY

[2] Seligman, Martin E. P.. Homo Prospectus (p. 282). Oxford University Press. Kindle Edition.

[3] Aristotle. (NE II.2)