The good life

There is a certain something to making a save which keeps your team in the game. Or finishing a book I was so engrossed in I did not want it to stop. Or watching a great game of sport. You know, that feeling of doing something or experiencing something that brings you joy, simple, unadulterated joy. In the darker times it is easy to forget those pleasures, or even why we care doing the things we do. Heck, I have to force my self from time to time to actually enjoy the things I do, otherwise it can seem I am simply moving on autopilot. In philosophy the concept of the good life, the dolce vida, is central to much discourse, and it is worth exploring that in the context of all the issues we are faced with in our own times.

For every kill I get in Destiny there is a programmer somewhere who has sweated buckets to get the coding right. Their good life has benefited from the money I spent on the game, and continue to spend on the game, a virtuous circle of my good life minutely helping someone else’s. This may seem like a random example, but it highlights how the things we do in life impact those around us. Pay it forward with a cup of coffee for a random homeless person who you will never meet; your empathy giving you a moment of please, the warm beverage helping the other person. All the things that go into making your own conception of what the good life is impact those around you. There is no one perfect way to live the good life, and it is the tension and overlap with others that helps shape how we move through the world.

If you are Steelers or Cowboys fan you are likely feeling sore about the 2023 playoffs, your football journey done for another year. Yet, conversely if you are a Texans or Lions fan you are walking on cloud nine. There was nothing either sets of fans could do to shape their good life, they simply bought into their teams when they got into football and their fandom was set ever since. Sports are good example of how we connect with others, each team’s followers having their own idea of what the good life should be. Sports are on par with politics and religion, a personal to us as a birth rite. Very few fans give up their team to switch allegiance over their lifetimes. For you your team shapes your conception of the best things in life, though often the worst things in life if they lose or fail to achieve. We do this to many things in life, hence why no two conceptions of the good life can ever be totally aligned. If we all liked, supported, believed in the same things life would be terminally dull.

Or is this an over simplification? Plato’s notion of the good life revolved around civic life, with citizens expected to be engaged in civil rites and duties. Fast forward to the enlightenment and the good life becomes a whole bundle of assumptions based on the personal conceptions of the writers. Locke, Hobbes, Burke, Rousseau and many others explored what it was to be an individual citizen in the world, not merely the subject of a sovereign. When we think of the good life in the western sense it draws on this font of Enlightenment understanding, that the true good life is the tension of personal freedoms and the obligations owed to the wider society. That we can stay up late to watch the Dolphins does not mean we can shirk Monday morning at work.

When you bring in Buddhist, Jewish, Sioux, and other non-Western European philosophies each attempts to draw its own balance between those two poles, often landing more on the group over the individual. Post-Enlightenment thinking has situated most western societies in the individual, where our personal good life is paramount, often at the expense of the societies around us. If you want to be an individual with emergent rights of your own, you face the challenge of moving through the world pitted against the rights of others. Conversely, group uniformity is often imposed based on a supposed idea of the good life, more Burke than Locke. Conservation of the past at the expense of individual identity can be a powerful force.

I can give you my notions of the good life in its complexities and texture, yet the reality is that what I understand and perceive to be good is just that, my own personal perception. And this is why there has never been a standardised or uniform set of values that have embedded in us all. We can choose to follow a set of precepts, morals, and ethics that shape a good life, but in reality there will always be other conceptions that we choose to reject or at the very least ignore. What makes our personal values the good life is only our perception of them, not their inherent goodness. Yes, it is easy to laugh at others values and joys, but ultimately that is very a case of be careful lest someone else does the same to you.

So, by all means enjoy watching your team do their thing, find pleasure in walking the dog or stroking the cat, in the end only you get to decide what the good life inherently means to you. The key issue is recognising that fact, recognise that it is your personal joy and you have no right to impose it on others. You do you, and let others do the same.