What does it actually mean to live a good life?
It’s a question philosophers have spent thousands of years trying to answer, and one I keep coming back to in my own writing. The more I think about it, the more convinced I become that we need to regularly examine the decisions we’re making and the people we’re becoming.
Our priorities can change considerably over the years, even when our plans remain much the same. You may still be working toward something you decided was important at twenty, despite having learned a great deal about yourself and what you want from life since then.
Maybe you still want it. Good. Then you should know why.
If your priorities have changed, that’s worth discovering before you dedicate another five years to it.
With another year coming to an end, many of us will soon be thinking about what we’ve accomplished and what we want to do next. I think that’s worth doing, but there’s much more to examine than our achievements. Have we become more patient with the people around us? Have we been there for those who needed us? Perhaps you’ve handled a difficult year with more courage than you would have thought yourself capable of, or accomplished everything you set out to do while neglecting something that matters far more to you. Those things deserve our attention too.
One of the things I appreciate most about Stoicism is how seriously it takes the examination of our own lives. The Stoics encouraged people to question their judgments and take responsibility for how they lived. I’ve chosen these five questions in that spirit, and I hope they’ll help you look more closely at things you’ve grown accustomed to taking for granted.
1. What do I actually want?
The longer you’ve been pursuing a goal, the harder it can become to imagine giving it up. You’ve made sacrifices for it. Other people know it’s what you’re working toward. It may even have become part of how you introduce yourself. After enough years, the time you’ve invested begins to feel like a reason to continue, although it tells you very little about whether the next few years would be well spent.
And I understand why that happens. Walking away from something you’ve worked toward for years can feel like admitting that all the effort was wasted. It’s an uncomfortable possibility, especially when the goal once meant a great deal to you. But our priorities change as we get older, and something that made perfect sense at twenty may no longer deserve the same place in our lives at thirty.
There’s also the question of what we’re expecting the achievement itself to give us. A promotion might offer greater responsibility and better pay, both of which could improve your life. But perhaps you’re also hoping that reaching a certain position will finally quiet the feeling that you haven’t accomplished enough.
Seneca described people who crossed seas hoping to escape their dissatisfaction, only to discover that the same troubled mind had accompanied them. They had changed their surroundings, sometimes quite dramatically, without finding the relief they’d expected. I suspect many of us have experienced a smaller version of this after accomplishing something we once wanted badly. The achievement feels wonderful for a while, and we’re proud of what we’ve done. Then ordinary life returns, along with some of the concerns we imagined success would leave behind.
That doesn’t make the achievement meaningless. Financial security can relieve worries that have followed you for years, and finally becoming good at something you’ve struggled with can change what you believe you’re capable of. Those are meaningful improvements. But the satisfaction of reaching a goal may be more temporary than we expect, especially when we’ve attached hopes to it that have little to do with the achievement itself.
I also wish we paid more attention to the life we’ll have to lead while pursuing our ambitions. We can become so attached to the idea of reaching a destination that we barely consider what getting there will require. You might love the thought of becoming fluent in another language, but feel considerably less enthusiastic about the evenings you’ll need to spend practicing. Perhaps you want to become healthier, or develop the discipline to follow through on things you’ve struggled with for years. Those are worthwhile ambitions, but they’ll ask something of you long before you have much progress to show for your efforts. And if we’re going to dedicate years of our lives to something, I think the way we spend those years deserves just as much consideration as what we hope to achieve at the end.
There will always be sacrifices involved in pursuing something meaningful. Some are well worth making, and the difficulty of an ambition isn’t necessarily a reason to abandon it. What matters is understanding what we’re giving up and whether the result still deserves that investment. The years you’ve already spent working toward something cannot answer that question for you.
Take one ambition that occupies a substantial part of your life and examine what you’re expecting from it. Can it realistically give you what you’re hoping for? Are you willing to live the life required to achieve it, knowing what you know today?
You might find that you still want it just as much as ever. I would consider that a good outcome, especially if you’ve arrived at it through genuine reflection. But if your reasons have changed, you should be willing to acknowledge that too. The next years of your life deserve their own justification.
2. What can I actually control?
One of the most familiar teachings in Stoicism is that some things are within our control while others are not. Epictetus placed this distinction at the very beginning of the Enchiridion, and much of his philosophy follows from learning to recognize the difference.
It’s a simple principle to understand, although applying it to ordinary life can be considerably more difficult.