Member-only story
What makes for a good life? One possible answer
People have been wondering about what makes life good and worth living probably ever since human beings have been able to wonder about something that they could articulate to themselves and others, i.e., since the evolution of language. For the past two and a half millennia we have a record of such musings, chiefly to be found among the world’s religious and philosophical traditions. It is therefore from the point of view of my chosen philosophy of life that I will attempt to answer the question.
I grew up Catholic, but left the Church when I was a teenager because many of the dogmas did not make sense to me. To claim that God is simultaneously one and three seemed like a violation of basic laws of logic. And the “miracle” of transubstantiation means that at communion I am literally (as opposed to metaphorically) drinking the blood of Christ and eating his flesh, which sounded like a bunch of hocus-pocus to me. So I turned toward the far more sensible philosophy of secular humanism, grounded in the compelling logic of philosophers like Bertrand Russell and the sort of empirical evidence that comes from scientists like Carl Sagan.
That worked for me for over three decades. Until midlife crisis hit, accompanied by a sudden divorce, the death of my father, and a few other things that suddenly made me wonder “who am I?” and “what the hell am I doing here?” Secular humanism, as reasonable and empirical as it was, wasn’t really giving me any practical answers.
By that time I had shifted my academic career from biology to philosophy, and I figured that the answers, surely, would come from the area of human inquiry the name of which means “love of wisdom.” So I embarked in a quasi systematic quest to find a good philosophy of life, along the way examining Buddhism as well as a number of western authors, including Aristotle and Epicurus. They all had something interesting to say, and yet none of them quite clicked with me.
Then one day I was lazily looking over my Twitter feed when I came across a tweet that asked me to help celebrate “Stoic Week.” I thought, what on earth is Stoic Week? And why would anyone wish to celebrate the Stoics, of all people. Aren’t they the sort of Spock-like fellows who go around sporting a stiff upper lip and suppressing emotions? I mean, with…
