The psychologists have come up with just such a description. Not for what you or I would call a good life if we lived it, but what liberal, middle-class, postgraduate-degree-holding, urban-living, people familiar with the pop-culture would think they should say if asked what makes people feel as if they are living a good life.
Invariably it looks something like this (taken with minor edits from an actual source):
1. Healthy living and functioning
2. Having hobbies and recreational pursuits we enjoy
3. Doing work that allows us to feel, from time to time, as if we are highly competent at the job
4. Relatedness - intimate, romantic, and familial relationships
5. Connection to wider social groups
6. Feeling good in the here and now
7. Inner peace - freedom from emotional turmoil and stress
8. Feeling well informed about things that are important to us
9. A sense of autonomy, power and self-directedness
10. Finding meaning and purpose in life
11. Creativity allowing self-expression
Seriously. This is what they came up with. Word for word. My heart sinks every time I look at it. It's so darn... icky-sweet-nice. Like those articles about Ten Things Dying Patients Say - Number Seven Will Surprise You. I seriously doubt anyone ever said they regretted working too hard. Everyone I've ever seen working long hours has been doing so to avoid going back to the Divorce Flat, or a housemates-marriage. But I digress...
There are no qualifications, no conditions. It's mind-snappingly obvious (I will feel better if I'm not exposed to emotional turmoil and stress, and if I feel good in the here and now? Gee, who knew?), and also highly non-specific (what the hey is "healthy living and functioning" in a world where there is research to condemn or praise any darn diet or exercise regime under the sun?). Which is intentional. It is supposed to get us arguing about what it means, rather than whether it should be there at all.
It misses the point entirely. A good life does not consist of doing a whole bunch of things so that you can do a whole bunch of other things so you can do the whole bunch of things again. That's a treadmill, and Marty Augustine, the gangster in Chandler's The Long Goodbye, knew it: I gotta make a lot of money. I gotta make a lot of money, so I can juice the guys I gotta juice, so I can make a lot of money, so I can juice the guys I gotta juice.
When we do something so we can do something else later, that's called "work". And too often 'later' never comes. Everything is work, from the moment we wake up to the moment we go to sleep, and even sleep is about productivity and health, so that makes it work as well. The psychologist's 11-point good life is work: we are not advised to have friends because hanging with the bros is a neat way to waste the time, but because it gives us a feeling of connection that forestalls loneliness. We even need to "feel good in the here and now" because then we might not take drugs, get drunk, eat too much, or spend time in dark corners of the Internet. Everything we do is always about something else.
When everything we do is about something else we're going to do, or not going to do, or something that might happen, or that might not happen, that's not actual living. It's not even training. It's prep-work - but without ever getting to the actual decorating, let alone having a pleasant room to live in.
Which is a problem, because the things we enjoy doing are the things we do for the sake of the process, not the result. So if everything we do is about something else, we're not enjoying anything we do. Because it's something we are doing for some other reason other than doing it. (See Gilbert Ryle's The Concept of Mind, the chapter on Emotion, for details.)
I'd suggest that a good life is one in which a sizeable chunk of what we do is about itself. It prepares us for nothing, and prevents us from nothing. It is not something we do so we can do something else. It might be something we do so we can get something done: ironing, taking photographs, writing blog posts, hanging with the bros, watching a movie, putting the world to rights, fixing the roof, washing the car, reading a history book, lifting weights... as long as we are doing it because it is what we want to do, and we don't want to be doing anything else in that time, and it's not being done because then we can do something else, or then we will have a tick against some To-Do List.
(Edited - a lot - 15/3/2025)
No comments:
Post a Comment