7 Pieces of Ancient Wisdom for Living the Good Life Today

About love, death, busyness, and more…

Although a lot has changed since ancient times, human life is not something new. And neither are life’s questions, problems, and opportunities.

Like us, our ancient ancestors were living life, learning from it, and preserving its lessons in written form. And their ideas are just as relevant today. In fact, the time that has passed between when they wrote and when we read has aged their words like fine wine. It’s created clarity and depth of meaning.

And we get to drink it in.

Growth happens through the momentary discomfort of humbling ourselves and learning from another. So take a deep breath and allow these seven pieces of wisdom to inspire and challenge you to move towards the good life.

“When you are inspired by some great purpose, some extraordinary project, all your thoughts break their bonds.” — Patanjali

Although we’re often looking for hacks to improve our quality of life, finding a purpose is almost all we really need. Humans are adventurers and highly adaptive. We’re planet changers (and sometimes destroyers), city builders, and culture creators.

If you want to feel fully alive, find a purpose that you can’t set down. Start a project that takes over your thoughts. You’ll feel free and full of potential. And, most of all, your life will take on a level of meaning that few ever find.

To live the good life, find your ‘why’.

Don’t let your search for purpose make you freeze up. Just start with what you have. What are you passionate about? If you don’t know, get clear on what you don’t care about and then just try other stuff. The important thing is that you become aware of your need for a purpose, you open yourself up to it, and you be patient. Often, the best projects find us.

“He who fears death will never do anything worthy of a man who is alive.” -Seneca

Whether it be conscious or subconscious, many of us have not made peace with our mortality. And this holds us back from living. We can try to ignore it, but the moment something reminds us of life’s end, we’ll freeze again.

I often struggle with my mortality. And the times where it’s the worst are the times where I’m trying not to think about it. Although it might feel counter-intuitive, thinking about our mortality is the way to break its power over us.

To live the good life, practice ‘memento mori.’

Like Seneca, stoic thinkers often write about death as a doorway to living a good life. To the stoics, the way to get over one’s fear of death is to contemplate death. In other words, to face the fear until it’s so familiar that it’s no longer so scary. The stoics call this, ‘memento mori’ — which is Latin for, “Remember you must die”. That’s a cheery token to carry with you, eh?

So if you want to overcome your fear of failure and live the good life, remember that you must die. Consider it, plan for it, accept it. As the stoic thinker, Epictetus wrote,

“Discipline yourself against such fear, direct all your thinking, exercises, and reading this way — and you will know the only path to human freedom.”

“Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.” -Rumi

This may be the most important and difficult task we will ever take on. And one that few will ever attempt.

Even if we don’t say it out loud, most of us want to be loved. And so we look for love. Sometimes openly and sometimes quietly — hoping, just hoping, that it will come our way. But as Rumi writes, seeking love is not our task. It won’t help us experience the good life.

This is a significant paradigm shift. What stops us from being loved is not that others don’t love us, it’s that we can’t receive their love. The problem is in us, not in the world.

To live the good life, stop looking for love.

Instead, focus on the hangups that keep you from noticing and receiving love from others. Maybe it’s your fear of commitment, your insecurity, or your past hurts that have built up a stone fortress around your heart. I don’t know what your blockages are. I’m just beginning to identify mine. But the point is — love is central to living the good life, and to experience it we must remove all that protects us from it.

“Make the best use of what’s in your power and take the rest as it happens.” -Epictetus

I don’t know about you, but I’ve got a control problem. A lot of my frustration with life comes from trying to control things I can’t control or obsessing over things that don’t go my way — things I couldn’t have changed even if I had tried.

Trying to control things that we can’t control sucks the life out of life.

There’s a delicate balance here: whatever you can do to make life better for you and others, do it. But for the things you can’t control, let them go. Accept life as it comes and you’ll begin to feel your stress and anxiety soften and melt away.

To live the good life, choose the things that life chose for you.

We can intentionally “take the rest as it happens.” How? Well, instead of fighting our unchangeable circumstances, we can radically transform our experience of them by intentionally choosing them. When we do this, burdensome things become our teachers and inconveniences become opportunities.

“Beware the barrenness of a busy life.” -Socrates

Many of us still pride ourselves on how much we do. The thing is, busyness will never get us to the good life.

We’re often busy because we’re running from something. We’re doing it to distract ourselves from… ourselves. We’re unable to sit with ourselves in silence for fear that we won’t like who we’ve become.

But we can’t move forward in life if we keep distracting ourselves by filling every minute of our days.

The goal of life is not to be busy, it’s to be present — it’s to enjoy the time we have. This doesn’t mean we can’t fill our time with things. It’s just about why we’re filling our time with things. And why those things…

To live the good life, become mindful.

The best way I know to overcome this busyness is to become mindful. Becoming mindful will remove a lot of the reasons you’re staying busy. It’ll stop the constant running and avoiding. And it’ll make it feel natural to not fill every minute of your days with things to distract you. You’ll even grow to enjoy the “empty” space of life.

There’s a lot of writing out there about cultivating mindfulness. For now, just try closing your eyes and sitting still in silence for 2 minutes. Don’t worry about where your mind goes, just try to pay attention to your thoughts as if they’re the thoughts of someone else.

“Do not judge, or you too will be judged.” -Jesus of Nazareth

We spend a lot of time paying attention to other people’s lives. And we’re not always so kind to them. We judge constantly and it wears us down because the human heart does not run well on judgement.

I don’t think of myself as a judgemental person, but when I pay attention, I see that I easily judge people who are different from me. I just don’t call it ‘judgement’ because I feel that what I think about them is ‘true’.

There’s a place for calling out injustice and challenging a friend to change, but when this becomes a regular part of lives, we’re in danger. In danger of what? in danger of being judged ourselves. When we position ourselves as a judge to the world, the world judges back.

To live the good life, accept others as they are.

As a general rule, look at people as if you were their perfectly loving parent. Be patient with them, seek to understand them, accept them as they are. Question your prejudices and defend people who other people judge.

There’s a time to challenge others, but even this can be done in a non-judgemental way. By all means, call someone out if they’re hurting others. But make sure you’re not living your life as a judge unless you’re looking for a shortcut to misery.

“A roaring lion kills no game.” -African proverb

The good life prioritizes quiet action over loud showmanship because sitting around and talking about something gains nothing.

A loud lion scares away its potential meal and although it attracts attention from other lions, soon they’ll realize he has no food to share. They’ll realize he was all talk and no ‘game’. And he’ll have no food and no attention.

To live the good life, prioritize action (however small).

Don’t brag and don’t show off. Go about your dreams quietly — pursue them because you’re passionate about them, not so others see you. Prioritize action (however small) and keep moving forward. Ignore the loud people that just want everyone to look at them.

The Final Word

Although life is different today than it was when Patanjali, Seneca, and Jesus lived and wrote, we’re still grappling with the same questions about how to live the good life.

But we have an amazing opportunity today — we can read ancient wisdom from different world-changing thinkers and take that advice together to make it our own.

If we allow these seven pieces of ancient wisdom to challenge and inspire us to grow, we can experience the good life.

• Find a purpose that makes you feel alive.
• Make peace with your mortality by considering it.
• Don’t seek love. Focus on removing your blockages to receiving it.
• Control what you can control and let go of what you can’t.
• Stop accepting your crazy busyness and become mindful instead.
• Do not judge other people, and they will not judge you.
• Quietly prioritize action (however small).