The “Good Life” Many philosophers, writers, and artists spent their lives trying to achieve the “good life”. Socrates, Aristotle, and Epictetus all have different viewpoints, and years later, poets like Sir Walter Raleigh have a different approach. After spending the semester studying philosophy, I have developed my own viewpoint, and I like to think it is a much more modern take. A quote from Ferris Bueller embodies my philosophy surprisingly well, “Life moves pretty fast, if you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.” Socrates claims that virtue is knowledge. If we behave incorrectly, we haven’t attained the knowledge to live correctly. His teachings put emphasis on the balance between rational reflection on yourself and also contributing to society. Attaining the skill to fit in the role that has been given to you. This may sound reasonable, but his philosophies put a lot of focus on restraint. He believed certain amounts of freedom would only lead to chaos. Aristotle said, “Humans are rational animals, so living a good human life means seeking to know.”...“Happiness is the meaning and the purpose of life, the whole aim and end of human existence,” he said. This means someone who wants to live a good life must put in the effort to be happy and know what they want to achieve through gaining logic and reason. It can be hard to know what makes you happy as an individual. For some people, it’s partying on a Friday night, for others, it’s sitting down and reading a good book. You need to learn and observe in order to know how to best spend your time. Epictetus has a slightly different approach given that he was born into slavery and later became a freedman and a well-known Greek Stoic Philosopher. He believed there are three parts to living the “good life”. Firstly, desire, one must want certain things in life and be willing to fight for those things. This can be a challenge, being that there are many distractions on the way to getting what you desire. His point is heavily influenced by the fact that he was a slave who fought to be freed. The second is choice. He stressed the importance of knowing you have free will and a choice in how you act and what you achieve. Someone who acts with intent toward something they want, instead of recklessly, is more likely to succeed. When applying these three things to your life, according to Epictetus, you are more likely to live the “good life”. Sisyphus is a man in Greek mythology who was punished by Hades for cheating death. He was forced to push a boulder up a mountain, have it fall down the mountain, only to push it back up again, for eternity. Many could compare his task to life itself. A regular 9-5 job may seem just as pointless. An author influenced by Søren Kierkegaard, Arthur Schopenhauer, and Friedrich Nietzsche, Albert Camus said, “We must imagine Sisyphus happy.” This statement leaves hope for those who feel as if they lost meaning and choose to accept life’s meaningless. Camus promises that "life is meaningless, but worth living, provided you recognize it's meaningless." He teaches that organic happiness can be achieved without focusing on the meaning of life, whereas Western philosophy puts significant emphasis on finding meaning and gaining knowledge to the fullest extent. I don’t believe there is a right or wrong way of living, but I do my best to work toward being happy like Aristotle taught. Some of that is gaining knowledge, being virtuous, and acting with intent, and integrity. Another part of that is living by Camus’ philosophy, and accepting life for how it is, meaningless. There are still strategies to find meaning and beauty in life. Friedrich Nietzsche said, “He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.” It’s that balance between acceptance and drive that can keep an individual going. You need to work for what you want and accept the things you can’t control. That acceptance of life being meaningless can be a bit dark for some people, but plenty of performers and artists put a fun twist on this sentiment. Sir Walter Raleigh has a poem called What is our life? This poem describes life as a comedy, and earth as our stage, urging people to not take life so seriously. It can be exhausting constantly trying to live perfectly, and it’s hard to be present in a moment if you over analyze that moment. To illustrate… Two college graduates, Zeppelin and Sage, planned their senior trip to New York. Their trip was perfectly planned by Sage. Every minute of every day, Sage and Zeppelin were in a tourist hot spot. They were two days in, and Zeppelin wasn’t having the best time. He didn’t want to upset Sage during the trip, so he kept his mouth shut. On their third day there, everything seemed to be going wrong. The MET had a flood and was closed, the actor and his understudy playing Jean Valjean in Les Miserables both broke their ankles, and the two friends missed their dinner reservation. Sage was devastated and felt as if he let Zeppelin down. Zeppelin impulsively tried to save the day. He looked up the beach nearest to them, Coney Island Beach, hailed a cab and spent an hour getting out of the city, and another hour getting to the beach. Sage had no idea where they were going and was passive-aggressive toward Zeppelin the whole cab ride. The cab driver pulled over before they got to the beach. He told the boys he recommended that they get out early, to catch the sunset and miss the crowds. Sage mumbled under his breath, “I’m certain this guy just didn’t want to drive through the traffic.” When they got out, they realized the cab driver drove them to the part of the beach away from all the action. They looked at the horizon and could see just a spark of sunlight go behind a cloud. Zeppelin felt present for the first time in days. Sage looked at Zeppelin in relief and thanked him for thinking of taking him there. They pulled out their Katz Diner leftovers and had dinner on the beach. They talked for hours about their semesters, love lives, and their plans for the future, and as Sage passed over the cigarette that they both knew they shouldn’t have lit, they realized there was more to life than a plan. “The Good Life”, wasn’t a perfectly planned and lived life. It was being present for that spark of the sun ending the day, lighting a cigarette on the beach, and having a late-night chat with your best friend. I like to think Sage and Zeppelin were one step closer to living the good life than most people. I don’t believe in measuring the amount of good in a person’s life. As long as the individual living the life is able to appreciate moments for what they are, then they’ll have more than enough. You can’t score or tally how someone feels towards the sunsetting one day and the next because every time you think of rating each sunset, you’re thinking of what it could have been instead of what it is: the opportunity to see the sunset on that day and that time. You have good and bad days, analyzing which you have more of will only make a day worse. Being able to enjoy moments, in combination with being goal oriented is in my opinion the definition of a happy medium. The goal shouldn’t be the “good life” itself, but the goals along the path of achieving a “good life”. Strive to be a philosopher like Plato and question the shadows, but there is no perfect amount of questioning. At some point, you have to enjoy the shadows, the sunset, and the sparks from your lighter. Questioning is never-ending, but that sunset on 6/17/2023 will end. A happy life needs to be filled with new experiences. Questioning the perfect amount, working the perfect amount, and doing everything the perfect amount… isn’t attainable. Life can only be good if you can accept the imperfections, and sometimes, regretfully light that cigarette. Work Cited Jesper. “Living the Good Life with Stoic Master Epictetus.” Mind & Practice, 21 May 2021, mindandpractice.com/living-the-good-life-with-stoic-master-epictetus/. Parry, Richard, and Harald Thorsrud. “Ancient Ethical Theory.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 5 Feb. 2021, plato.stanford.edu/entries/ethics-ancient/#Socr. Reviewed by David Wolfsdorf, Temple University. “Socratic Virtue: Making the Best of the Neither-Good-nor-Bad.” Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, 29 Nov. 2018, ndpr.nd.edu/reviews/socratic-virtue-making-the-best-of-the-neither-good-nor-bad/. Rayhan, Abdullah. “Meursault, Sisyphus, and Happiness: What Albert Camus Tells Us about Life.” The Daily Star, 7 Nov. 2022, www.thedailystar.net/star-literature/news/meursault-sisyphus-and-happiness-whatalbert-camus-tells-us-about-life-3162536#:~:text=The%20Myth%20of%20Sisyphus %20ends,chooses%20to%20do%20it%20anyway.
