Google has two definitions for a “good life”. 1. a life of luxury, pleasure, and material comfort. 2.
a way of living that is moral, satisfying, and worthwhile.
I believe there are certain basic essentials that we all seek out as humans, and I don’t mean the
necessities like water or food. I mean things like family, and friends, and accomplishment. Most
of us believe that these make us happy and satisfied with the life we are living. We all strive to
get to a point in life where we are at that peak stage of happiness. This may look like choosing a
major that our parents are satisfied with because we believe that making our parents proud of
us will make us happy. This could mean joining a big friend group and going out on FDOC with
that popular frat group. We believe that if the popular gang likes us, then we are also cool and
popular, thus making us happy. This could also look like going for the higher paying job, even if
it’s not the job that interests us most, because we believe that having more money will make us
However, I see two debates here: one debate is, we aren’t all born with equal footing in this
world and we all don’t have access to the same situations. However, we all hear the stereotypes
from others about what kind of a life could make us happy. Well, this is just taken from others truth is we don’t really know how to define what true happiness means to us.
So truly, I believe that a good life is any life where we try to be happy, but not at the expense of
others.
Google has two definitions for the "good life": 1. a life of luxury, pleasure, and material
comfort. 2. a way of living that is moral, satisfying, and worthwhile. At first glance, these seem
like two different paths - one about material success, with the other about moral success.
However, they are teaching us the same lesson: that a good life is something we achieve by
meeting certain standards, whether that's accumulating enough money or being good enough
morally. We are told that if we just check the right boxes - earn enough, accomplish enough,
behave morally enough - we will finally reach that state of satisfaction and happiness. In reality
the "good life" as we have been taught to understand it is actually a myth - something that does
not exist. In fact, chasing after it, whether through material success or moral perfection, only
stops us from appreciating the life we are actually living.
From the time we are young, we are taught that certain things will make us happy. We
believe that if we make our parents proud, we will be happy. Some of us choose majors our
parents are satisfied with, even if it is not what we really want. We think that if the popular group
likes us, then we are cool too, so some of us will join the popular frat, hoping it will make them
happy. We go for the higher paying job, even if it is not the one that interests us most, because
we believe having more money will finally make us satisfied. And most importantly, we are told
to follow certain moral rules and social norms because being a "morally good person" will bring
us happiness and fulfillment. We do what our religion tells us, what society expects, what makes
us look virtuous to others - because someone has promised us that moral goodness equals the
good life, whether that reward comes now or in an afterlife. All our actions become some form
of a pursuit of this happiness, this "good life" we are promised.
Here is the problem: we are not all born into this world equally. We do not all have access
to the same resources, the same love, nor the same situations. Some of us are born into
circumstances where following those moral rules society laid out is nearly impossible. A person
born into poverty might have to lie or steal just to survive. Someone raised in a broken family
might never learn what it means to be a "good person" the way society defines it. And even when
we do follow all the moral guidelines we are given, even when we check off every box of what
makes someone "good," that promised happiness still does not come because the goalpost keeps
moving. There is always another moral standard to meet, another way we are falling short,
another thing we are told we need to do to finally achieve that good life. We keep following the
rules, hoping that one day we will finally reach that peak stage of moral satisfaction and
happiness, but it never quite comes.
However, this is where the real damage happens. When we are so focused on chasing this
idea of a "good life" through following prescribed morals and expectations, we stop appreciating
what we actually have. We are constantly judging ourselves - are we good enough? Moral
enough? Are we living up to the standards? We dismiss our real experiences as "not good enough
yet" because they do not match this perfect moral ideal we have been sold. We are always living
for some future version of ourselves who will finally be virtuous enough, wealthy enough, happy
enough. But that future never actually arrives because we are chasing something that was never
real to begin with.
Thus, to answer the question "what is the good life?" - the good life is not something we
achieve by following a prescribed set of morals or meeting other people's expectations of
goodness. The good life is whatever life we are living right now, as long as we choose to be
grateful for what we have. It is about letting go of that myth we have been chasing and finding
appreciation in the present moment, in the life that is already ours.