The Good Life

Discovering Peace, Purpose and Freedom Indirectly

The good life is a hard one to define. Many of us more weathered folk are familiar with the phrase from the mid-70s successful sitcom by the same name. It portrayed a middle-aged couple leaving the rat race to become self-sufficient. I loved it, not with any knowledge of midlife crises but as a concept, as did much of the public. They produced four series, a great success in its day.

The premise was about growing your own fruit and veg while living frugally in the face of neighbourly expectations. Society hasn’t changed much in that respect for 50 years. It traces back far beyond our world view bubble.

No history lesson is complete without the Ancient Greeks. Their take on the good life was not pleasure but flourishing through virtue, purpose and living in accordance with one’s nature. I think there is an iridescence of that in society’s desires, but like the shifting glint on an ocean’s surface you can never quite track it.

As a fan of stoicism that has failed excruciatingly, inner steadiness was their motto. Wanting less and remaining composed while mastering perception and all its folly.

It’s easy to think you are in the pocket of that philosophy until things go south and you find yourself anything but stoic. I still aspire, but feel I’ve lost the licence. Perhaps a breakdown is how you earn it, but it also seemed to be like being taken off the roads to save you from your own ignorance.

Spiritual traditions often see it as alignment with faith, meaning, compassion and transcendence. This reiterates how hard it is, given that many of those traditions are spent aspiring to be better despite the endless human failings.

Modern-day interpretations like to corrupt the sentiment from what I can tell. They might view it as comfort, status, accumulation of goods and experiences. The equivalent of branding your successes and marketing your KPIs.

It’s interesting to me that in order to figure out what it is, I have to begin with what it’s not. The visceral experience of what doesn’t feel good helps to reveal what does.

For me, performative living stopped feeling good. Social comparison stole my joy, the sense that I was a pawn in others’ games stripped my autonomy through unchecked agreeableness. A lack of meaning had me aimlessly wandering the world wondering what it was all about.

By living so far from my own temperament I had lost balance.

I needed to reconnect with simple pleasures, with nature, with myself.

Recent uncertainty has been tapping me on the shoulder, whispering questions from a future self as if willing me to learn for myself a suitable path.

There is only so much fishing one can do to regain balance before they wonder if they have overcorrected.

It’s not endless pleasure I’ve been seeking, but more peace to be comfortable with hearing myself think.

Purpose is required to keep me sailing towards something so I don’t drift back to where I’ve already been. I wax and wane with writing as and when the wind allows.

The freedom to remain myself, or more accurately, rediscover a preferred and sustainable self, is where things could get interesting.

We find ourselves in societies corridors, filing along and making the turns that are built in. How many of us can legitimately say we’ve designed our own life without those walls of expectation hemming us in?

How do we begin to get a second wind in the midlife doldrums when the arrival through the tumultuous weather was as exhausting as it was exhilarating. I’m waiting to catch the faintest breeze while repairing the efforts to date.

If we were plucked from our current worlds with the freedom and means to start fresh, what life would we create? I don’t think it would be an anonymous network node creating data, but in some sense that’s what we all end up doing in some form.

It feels to me like the good life can only be found through a kind of peripheral empiricism, that indirect experience of trial and error that either adds or subtracts from a satisfying life.