Living a "Good" Life
It's the only choice that lasts
I’m old, crotchety, and I know my plane is on its final descent. The only question is whether it’ll explode in midair or hit a mountain before landing. I’ve lived the good life, and increasingly, in my time remaining, I’m trying to live a good one. As my legacy, I’d like to pass along some wisdom I’ve accumulated as to the difference between “the good life” and “a good life”.
Why Bother
If nothing in life matters, why do anything other than please myself? Certainly that seems to be how most people are living today.
The one thing nobody can take from you is the choice of how you live. A man in China and a man in Kansas don’t have the same options, but both wake up and decide who they’ll be within whatever cage they’re in. The consequences differ, but the fact that they have a choice does not.
So what guides are available to help us choose? The common choices are:
Religion — pick a hymn book
Media — outrage of the day
Movements — green, woke, animal, climate, pick a cause and a tribe
Politics — pick a master
Or drift aimlessly
But there’s another option. Here’s the one that works and why.
The Stoics figured this out two thousand years ago. It influenced Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus, Seneca. It shaped the thinking of the American founding fathers. And today, it’s the basis of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy — the only branch of psychotherapy that actually has evidence that it works. The core insight is brutally simple: you can’t control what happens to you, but you can control how you respond to it. That’s not self-help fluff. That’s the difference between a life of meaning and one that just happens.
What Is “Good”?
There are three categories of behavior. That’s it, though actions can fall across boundaries.
Good — helping others
Bad — helping yourself
Evil — hurting others
Bad isn’t evil. Bad is just small. Most people are bad most of the time and that’s fine — you have to eat, sleep, handle your own shit. The problem is when bad becomes the norm. When helping yourself is all you ever do or think about. Think narcissism and the behavior of most celebrities and media stars, not to mention politicians.
Evil is different. It’s controlling, manipulating and hurting others for your own purposes or pleasure. Think the latest Manson clone, the greedy corporate executive whose products kill, the dictator who slaughters their citizens with impunity.
Good in contrast is about helping people. It’s outwardly focused on making them, and the world, a better place, without consideration of how it benefits the giver or even if anyone is aware of the effort.
This isn’t philosophy. This is a compass that fits in your pocket. Use it to gauge people’s motivations. Watch their hands (what they do), not their lips (what they say or promise).
How We Got Lost
We didn’t drift into today’s confusion by accident. We were pushed.
Our Parents
Your parents were probably the first generation in your family with enough comfort to check out completely. They had money their own parents never dreamed of, distractions those parents couldn’t imagine, and were less engaged with their children than any generation before them. In the process, they were losing their own anchors and couldn’t pass down what they never had. Some tried. Most didn’t. As divorce became normal, so did absence. And here you are, raised by screens and daycare, wondering why you feel so unmoored.
Moral Relativism
The institutions that were supposed to hold the line collapsed from within. The Catholic Church — priests fucking the altar boys, priests fucking each other, and a hierarchy that spent more energy covering it up than stopping it. Protestants were no better. Churches diluted their own messages until they were indistinguishable from a corporate HR memo. Concert halls instead of sanctuaries. Private jets. Constant “money, money, money!” exhortations. When the people who claim to hold truth reveal themselves as grifters, people stop believing in truth at all.
Moral relativism isn’t a philosophy. It’s a retreat. It’s what you say when you’re too afraid to call something wrong because calling it out might cost you something. “That’s just your truth.” “Who’s to say what’s right?” Anyone with a spine, that’s who. Anyone who’s willing to make a stand and defend it.
Communism / Socialism
Marx called religion the opiate of the masses. He wasn’t entirely wrong about the opiate part — he just wanted to replace it with a stronger drug. Give your life to the State, not to God. Surrender your conscience to the Party. China is the finished product: any competing source of meaning gets crushed because meaning that doesn’t flow through the Party is a threat to the Party.
Consumerism
This was the smarter replacement. It didn’t argue or demand. It just made buying things feel like purpose. Live now. Treat yourself. You deserve it. No commandments except consume more. No sins except being poor. Buying things feels like meaning until it doesn’t — and by the time you notice, you’re in debt, your house is full of shit you don’t use, and the hole is still there. Read “The Midas Plague” by Frederik Pohl.
Schools
They were supposed to teach us how to think. Instead, they became factories for whatever ideology was in fashion. We didn’t lose our bearings. They were removed and replaced with guilt, oppression narratives, and the soft bigotry of low expectations dressed up as compassion.
Where We Stand Today
The US still has the ability to get its bearings back. The UK is a preview of what happens if we don’t. When you criminalize thought, when you arrest people for praying silently outside an abortion clinic, when you jail a man for a meme — you’re not looking at a free society that got a little carried away. You’re looking at a society that is already lost and is just waiting for the coin to fall between tails (communism) or heads (Sharia law).
The Good Life vs. A Good Life
The Good Life — money, success, power, fame. Having what you want. Living well.
It works for about five minutes. Shelley’s Ozymandias — the king who built monuments to his own greatness, now a broken statue in an empty desert. Can’t take any of it with you. The good life resets to zero the moment your heart stops.
The Addiction Problem
The good life builds tolerance. The first hit of money, fame, status — electric. The tenth — muted. The hundredth — nothing. You need more to feel less. Same dopamine machinery as a junkie. This is not a metaphor. This is why you see the millionaires/billionaires always buying the bigger mansion, the faster car, the bigger yacht.
A good life doesn’t build tolerance. Showing up for someone the tenth time provides the same satisfaction as the first, if not more. Helping others doesn’t require escalating doses.
The 4 AM Test
The good life surrounds you with employees, fans, and people who want something. Gated communities, VIP sections, private jets — all ways of isolating yourself from the rabble. When shit hits — and it always does — you look around and realize you have a network, not a community. What’s hanging from your body are leeches, not friends.
A good life surrounds you with people who owe you nothing and would still show up at 4 AM when you need them. Which one saves you when everything falls apart?
The Deathbed Inventory
Nobody (sane) dies thinking about their bank balance, their title, or their follower count. People die thinking about who they loved, who they helped, and who they hurt. The final inventory doesn’t care about the good life. It only tallies a good life. The only entries that won’t feel like wasted time are the ones where you gave something to someone who didn’t need to pay you back.
The Two-Generation Eraser
The good life is forgotten in two generations. Name your great-grandfather. You probably can’t. A good life ripples outward in ways you’ll never see. The person you helped helps someone else who helps someone else. You don’t get credit. You don’t need it. The ripple is the point. The good life builds monuments. A good life builds communities. Monuments crumble. People keep moving.
The Closed Loop vs. The Open Loop
The good life takes things in and holds them. Every win is a deposit into an account that closes when you die. A good life takes things in and passes them on. Every act of help is a deposit into someone else’s account, who deposits into someone else’s. One is a bucket. The other is a river. The bucket soon evaporates. The river keeps moving.
The Strange Math
The good life is zero-sum. Your win is someone else’s loss. Your status requires someone else’s lower status. A good life is positive-sum. Helping someone doesn’t take from someone else. It creates something that didn’t exist before. One is a game you eventually lose. The other is a game where everyone who plays wins.
The Virtues
So what are the rules we should follow then to live a good life? If the compass points toward helping others, the virtues are how you walk the path. The Stoics identified four cardinal virtues. They’ve held up for over two thousand years because they’re not abstract ideals — they’re operating instructions that work.
Wisdom
Wisdom is knowing what’s worth giving a shit about and what isn’t. Most of what you worry about doesn’t matter. Most of what you’re angry about won’t matter in a week. Wisdom is the ability to tell the difference before you waste your life on the wrong things.
It’s also knowing what you don’t know. The stupidest people on earth are the ones most certain of everything. Wisdom requires the humility to say “I might be wrong” and the courage to change your mind when the evidence demands it. This is rare because it’s painful. Being wrong feels like dying. Getting over it feels like being born.
Practical wisdom means seeking out people who disagree with you instead of building a fortress of like-minded opinions. It means reading books that challenge you. It means sitting with discomfort instead of scrolling past it.
Courage
Courage isn’t the absence of fear. It’s doing the right thing while your knees are shaking. Physical courage is the least of it — most of us will never face a battlefield. The courage that matters day to day is moral courage: saying what’s true when it’ll cost you. Standing up for someone when the crowd is against them. Admitting you were wrong when you’d rather die than say the words.
Courage is also endurance. Getting up when you’ve been knocked down. Keeping your commitments when nobody’s watching. Showing up for the hard conversation instead of letting it fester. Courage is a muscle. Use it or lose it.
Temperance
Temperance is the virtue nobody wants to talk about because it sounds boring. It’s not. Temperance is self-control, and self-control is freedom. The person who can’t say no to a drink, a purchase, a rage-fit, or a scroll isn’t free. They’re a puppet with their own impulses pulling the strings.
Temperance means knowing when enough is enough. It means enjoying pleasure without being owned by it. It means restraint in speech — not every thought needs to leave your mouth. It means restraint in consumption — not every desire needs to be fed. The modern world is engineered to destroy your temperance. Every app, every ad, every algorithm is designed to make you want more and resist less. Temperance is the act of taking your mind back.
Justice
Justice is giving people what they’re owed. Not what’s convenient. Not what makes you look good. What they’re actually owed. This means keeping your word. Paying your debts. Giving credit to people who earned it instead of stealing it for yourself.
Justice also means standing against unfairness, even when you benefit from it. The easiest thing in the world is to look the other way when a system is rigged in your favor. Justice demands you look anyway — and speak out for those who cannot.
At the personal level, justice is about treating the people in your life fairly. Your spouse, kids, and coworkers. The stranger at the checkout counter. Not because they can do anything for you, but because they’re owed basic decency by virtue of being human.
The Vices
The Stoics defined their vices as well. But the Christians did a better job of naming the ways we rot from the inside. Seven of them. Each one a trap, and each one feels good right up until it doesn’t.
Pride
Pride is the king of vices — the one that makes all the others possible. It’s the belief that you’re the center of the universe and everyone else is a supporting character in your story. Pride is why you can’t apologize. Pride is why you can’t learn. Pride is why you’d rather burn a relationship to the ground than admit you were wrong.
Pride is not the same as dignity. Dignity is knowing your worth. Pride is insisting everyone else acknowledge it. Pride is fragile — it needs constant feeding — and the hungrier it gets, the more it consumes everything around it. The proud man dies alone and confused about why nobody showed up.
Greed
Greed is the lie that more will fix it. More money. More stuff. More status. It’s the voice that says, “Just one more promotion, just one more zero, and then I’ll be satisfied.” That voice has never told the truth. Greed is a thirst that mistakes salt water for fresh.
Greed doesn’t just hurt the greedy. It hurts everyone whose share gets taken to feed the hunger. The greedy man looks at a pie and sees only his slice. The greedy CEO cuts wages while buying a third house. The greedy friend who always needs a favor and never returns one. Greed shrinks your world until it’s just you and your hoard, and then it shrinks some more.
Lust
Lust is using people as objects and calling it freedom. It’s reducing another human being to a body that serves your needs. Pornography is lust industrialized — an endless supply of objects that never say no, never have needs, never require you to be a person in return.
Lust destroys relationships because it trains you to see people as consumable. Why do the hard work of intimacy when fantasy is easier? Why learn to love a real person with flaws and needs when you can have a perfect illusion that demands nothing? The answer is that the illusion is a desert, and you’re dying of thirst while hallucinating water.
Envy
Envy is the only vice that feels bad even while you’re doing it. There’s no pleasure in envy — just the slow burn of watching someone else have what you want and hating them for it. Envy is counting other people’s blessings instead of your own. It’s the voice that says, “why them and not me.”
Envy poisons gratitude. You can’t be grateful and envious at the same time. And without gratitude, you can’t be happy — because happiness isn’t having what you want, it’s wanting what you have. The envious person could win the lottery tomorrow and be miserable by Tuesday because someone else won a bigger prize.
Gluttony
Gluttony is consumption without limits. Food is the obvious form, but gluttony applies to everything: binge-watching, binge-scrolling, binge-buying. It’s the refusal to say “enough.” Gluttony is what happens when temperance dies.
The modern economy runs on gluttony. Streaming platforms autoplay the next episode. Social media has no bottom. Food is engineered to be impossible to stop eating. Gluttony isn’t just a personal failing anymore — it’s a business model. And you’re the product.
Wrath
Wrath is anger that’s stopped serving any purpose except itself. Righteous anger has a place — it’s what drives you to fight injustice. But wrath is anger that’s become an identity. It’s the person who needs to be outraged to feel alive. It’s the comment section warrior, the road rage driver, the parent who breaks things when they’re mad and calls it discipline.
Wrath destroys the vessel it lives in. It corrodes your health, your relationships, your capacity for joy. And unlike most vices, wrath wants company — it spreads. One wrathful person can poison a whole family, a whole workplace, a whole comment thread.
Sloth
Sloth isn’t laziness. Laziness is taking a nap because you’re tired. Sloth is the refusal to do what you know you should do, not because you can’t, but because you won’t. It’s the path of least resistance made into a lifestyle.
Sloth is the guy who knows his marriage is dying and doesn’t do anything about it. The employee who knows he’s coasting and doesn’t care. The parent who lets screens raise their kids because it’s easier.
Sloth isn’t about sleeping in. It’s about the slow, comfortable surrender of everything that matters in exchange for nothing at all. It’s also the years you spend “about to” change — the planning, the researching, the telling yourself you’ll start Monday. Monday is where good intentions go to die. Get the fuck up and go!
It’s Simple and It’s Hard
Live the virtues. Avoid the vices. That’s the whole thing. It’s not complicated. It’s just difficult.
You Will Fail
That’s not a possibility — it’s a guarantee. You will fail at every virtue and fall into every vice, probably more than once. Some of them you’ll fall into so often you’ll start to think that’s just who you are. It’s not. It’s just who you’ve been so far.
Failure is not an endpoint. It’s a rep. Like any habit, you pick yourself up and do it again. Edison didn’t fail a hundred times to invent the light bulb — he found a hundred ways that didn’t work and kept going. You don’t get to quit because you fell on your face yesterday. You get up today.
It gets easier with practice. That’s not a metaphor. That’s how our neural pathways work. Every time you choose patience over wrath, you’re carving a groove. Every time you select generosity over greed, the groove gets deeper. Eventually, the groove becomes the default. You’re not fighting yourself anymore. You’re just living.
Lifelong Commitment
The longer you work at it, the better you get. The more rewards accrue — not money, not status, but the actual satisfaction of seeing others prosper because you helped. That satisfaction doesn’t fade. It doesn’t build tolerance. It’s the only drug that gives more the longer you take it.
And here’s the strange part: unless you surround yourself with assholes, the less of an asshole you are, the more people want to be around you. Helping others isn’t just moral. It’s practical. It builds the only safety net that can’t be taken away — people who know you’d show up for them, so they’ll show up for you.
You Are Not a Doormat
Helping others doesn’t mean setting yourself on fire to keep someone else warm. It doesn’t mean saying yes to every request, absorbing abuse, enabling someone else’s bad choices, or neglecting your own health. A drowning man can’t save anyone. The point isn’t self-destruction — it’s direction. Aim outward, not just inward. That’s all.
The Bottom Line
You have exactly one thing that’s yours: how you choose to live. Everything else is noise, theft, or a sales pitch. Choose something that isn’t just about you. Start today — the earlier, the better, but even if you’re as old as I am, you can still make a difference in someone’s life. It’s the only choice that matters. It’s the only choice that lasts. And when your own plane starts its final descent — and it will — you’ll know whether you spent the flight staring out the window or helping the person in the seat beside you.