The Pursuit of a Good Life

I want to live a good life. Thus, I have been grappling with the question of what a good life is for a while. For me, the pursuit of a good life starts with motivation to achieve that life. So, I asked myself the question of why I wanted to live a good life in the first place, and started examining my own motivations with this in mind. Below is the product of this exercise.

The first question I needed to answer was, how can a person examine themselves objectively, when this process of examination is something which must be included in the examination? I suggested to myself that we must embrace incompleteness. We define a goal of the examination, and try to optimise for that goal rather than developing a general framework.

Next, before narrowing down on myself, I asked myself the more general question of what motivates us as humans? This is a nuanced discussion, and there is no one clear answer. I think most psychologists would agree that motivations operate in connected hierarchies where much of the structure is not immediately apparent.

At this point I realised that the presupposition that there is someone examining themselves with the goal of living a good life implies that there is a possibility that they may need to reform these motivations. This arises from the connection between motivation and action. Let me explain.

Examination for the purpose of living a good life is only meaningful and productive if we assume that not all lives are good, otherwise no examination is required. We can reasonably assume that the actions one takes affect the probability that they live a good life. Assuming that our relationship to our impulses and emotions can also be meaningfully altered, these actions can be influenced (maybe entirely) by our motivations. Thus, the unwillingness to potentially change our motivations is the unwillingness to potentially change our probability of achieving a good life.

This is in contradiction with our initial goal. Not accepting the possibility of change implies either not wishing to live a good life (a contradiction) or believing that our motivations are sufficient to live a good life already (thus rendering the examination useless).

Now, with the acknowledgement that alteration to one’s motivations may need to occur, this raises the new question of what reformation should occur. I explore this issue below.

The desire to live a good life is beneficial to living a good life, given that there are still actions which are yet to be taken which influence whether a life can be defined as good. This is because this motivation will affect the probability that one takes actions that contribute towards this goal, as explained before. It is my belief that we cannot prematurely apply constraints on what a good life is, and thus we cannot assume that living a good life has been fully realised without having reason to do so. This implies that we can consider the desire to live a good life as beneficial without good reason to believe that we have already achieved this goal.

Thus, my final message is to advocate for cautious humility. The pursuit of living a good life requires a willingness to transform paired with the confidence to remain steadfast in your most fundamental views that ultimately shape the pursuit itself.