The good life
What virtue, values and Voltaire have to say about why we do what we do
I went public with my self-induced existential angst, breaking up the days of job hunting by musing on the meaning of it all, concluding that we exist at all is remarkable, it's a privilege to be existential and meaning is ours to mould.
For those with choice over how they earn a crust, what is the right relationship to have with work? How should we live day-to-day to avoid regret? What does it mean to live a good life?
I’ll trot around these questions is in two parts. This article mangles virtue, values and Voltaire; next time I'll look at motivation, the fallacy of following your passion and what makes work unenjoyable.
Following that, I shall try the approaches, techniques and exercises that claim to give one clarity on what job will suit them best. But don’t let that stop you telling me.
Virtue
The idea of living for more than possessions, power or prestige isn't new. The Stoics, who lived in Greece around 300 BCE, thought the path to happiness was accepting the present moment, cultivating self-control and aligning one’s will with nature or reason. Sounds obvious, but do you?
Stoics believed that virtue—a wonderful word—is the highest and only true good in life. Virtue is expressed through noble but hard to measure values such as reason, wisdom, courage, justice, temperance and living in accordance with nature. Your moral worth comes not from what you have or achieve, but from how you behave. Because the only things we can truly control are our own thoughts, actions, and attitudes, we should focus on those and accept what we cannot change, especially other people, with equanimity.
There is renewed interest in the Stoics, driven by the inexorable rise of mental health problems, the post-pandemic-financial crisis-fall of communism-wave of ennui and the creeping sense we’ve collectively lost our way.
Dr Iain McGilchrist, a man with an improbably large intellect and beard, has thought hard about what underlies this drift towards disconnection: our peculiar brains. McGilchrist says, and it’s surely hard to disagree, that we don't talk enough about the depressing truth that as "affluent as we are, we are also more anxious, depressed, lonely, isolated, and lacking in purpose than ever, we are making ourselves wretched".
"The things that used to alert us to the inadequacy of our reductionist theories are fading away. They were: the natural world; the sense of a coherent shared culture; the sense of the body as something we live, not merely possess; the power of great art; and the sense of something sacred that is real but transcends everyday language."
What's this got to do with our brains? Well, first you need to be brought up to date with what is known about its two sides. For reasons of survival, one hemisphere of the brain, the left, evolved to favour manipulation, picking things up, having, and controlling—while the right has been tasked with understanding the whole picture. The problem of recent history is therefore at least in part due to "left hemisphere dominance". Because our propensity to manipulate things proved so useful, we ended up ignoring the intelligent side of our heads and "settled on the one whose value has nothing to do with truth, or with courage, magnanimity, or generosity, but only with greed, grabbing, and getting."
To confront yourself and ask how Stoic you've been lately or how in touch you are with your right brain could be a tall ask. Who wants to admit they have insufficient virtue? The truth, though, expressed sharply by David Foster Wallace, is that all of us, deep down, are hard wired to believe we are the most important person in existence. Is this "socially repulsive" reality a blockage to being more reasonable, wise, brave and fair? If Wallace is right, we will all worship something—and perhaps there could be a reason to pick the supernatural because "pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive".
If you worship money and things, you will never feel you have enough. If it's your looks, old age is going to mortify you. If you crave power, you're likely setting yourself up for a life of fear, unsatisfyingly fed with more and more power. Ever seen Putin smile? If you worship intellect, then you're going to always feel stupid.
Wallace warned us that our choice of god is unconscious—do you know what you truly worship? Freedom, that double edge sword I wrote about last time, has let us become "lords of our own tiny skull-sized kingdoms". To save ourselves from misery we need to redirect our freedom towards "attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day". Alternatively, and the default setting for most people, is "the constant gnawing sense of having had and lost some infinite thing".
Value
This need for things is culturally endemic, especially in the West and in the modern era, especially the glorification of goals. Successful people are defined in terms of the things they’ve achieved. An industry exists to convince us we can and should all do more, become permanently industrious, if only we use the right app or productivity paradigm. Fitter, happier and more productive.
Victor Frankl, the holocaust survivor and meaning of life guru, warned us about our societal "achievement orientation", which causes us to adore the young, successful and happy—those (we perceive are) achieving the most. We collectively ignore the value of everything else and blur "the decisive difference between being valuable in the sense of dignity and being valuable in the sense of usefulness".
In The Happiness Trap by Russ Harris, he explains that if the point of life is to achieve goals, we risk condemning ourselves to "long stretches of frustration punctuated by fleeting moments of gratification, if and when we do achieve our goals". Similar ideas are supported by a host of philosophic thought reviewed by Kieran Setiya in Midlife: A Philosophical Guide—which I read to check whether I am having an elaborate mid-life crisis (answer: maybe).
Setiya observes that a goal orientated life is not only likely to be disappointing but it is peculiar: why do we devote our days to ending, one by one, the activities we think gave them meaning? If we had everything that we want, then what? We ought to be delighted but it is more likely we will be aimless and depressed because "our pursuit is over and we have nothing to do". Elon?
Harris, based on research from the psychological movement of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, says we should instead of goals aim to become better acquainted with our values and to live in accordance with them. Values are not binary pass/fail options like goals, but "your heart’s deepest desires for how you want to behave as a human being".
Once you decide (or better understand) what your values are, it is, he claims, easy to know whether or not you're living them. And because you can never complete a value, we can improve how well we follow our own values forever.
Can it be that simple? Setiya sets out a disconcerting paradox that warrants attention. If life needs direction, does this mean we must have desires, aims and projects that are as yet incomplete? Yet, if we do, then we suffer for want of them. Are we destined "to be a state of constant pain, for it is painful to want what you cannot have?" Will a life lived in accordance with our values bring us peace and satisfaction?
Setiya offers a way out of the paradox by recommending we find meaning in the journey of life. As ever, this is an old idea we forgot about or didn't agree with. The Greeks, them again, made a distinction between telic and atelic activities. Telic activities are goal-orientated: finish the report, get promoted, earn more money, eat a Big Mac. Atelic activities are actions, processes, or states that do not have a defined end goal: walk in the woods, read, enjoy a meal, fall in love. They have "no limit, no outcome whose achievement exhausts them and therefore brings them to an end".
Can work be atelic? Setiya claims so. Whilst it might be hard to see it that way if you live an existence of deadlines, deals or targets, "atelic activities do not occupy some rarefied peak to which we seldom ascend. If you look for them, you can find them, and find meaning in them, all around." Are we being asked to filter out the truth of many jobs' unrewarding or exploitative monotony, or can we adapt our outlook on life and see our work as part of your journey with no end by training ourselves to be more present in the moment?
It is a simple but big claim that if we slow our minds and pay more attention to the here and now we can overcome the "magnetic pull of the telic orientation" and "prevent our attention from being absorbed by projects". But if your boss or client is demanding a reply to their email by lunchtime, it will take zen levels of conscious breathing to enjoy the process of everything we do at work. Frankl, meanwhile, urges us to reframe success such that it cannot be pursued, it must ensue as the "unintended side-effect of one’s dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the byproduct of one’s surrender to a person other than oneself." Try that when your maximising shareholder value.
Voltaire
Voltaire's Candide is a thrill packed parable from which we bequeathed the wonderful term 'panglossian'. After a series of unfortunate events, Candide is convinced that Master Pangloss has been telling porkies by insisting “all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds.”
Candide asks wonderful questions like, "Do you believe [...] that men have always massacred each other as they do to-day, that they have always been liars, cheats, traitors, ingrates, brigands, idiots, thieves, scoundrels, gluttons, drunkards, misers, envious, ambitious, bloody-minded, calumniators, debauchees, fanatics, hypocrites, and fools?"
Pretty disheartened to find the answer was a highly likely 'yes', Candide finally encounters a farmer living a simple life and concludes that instead of debating abstract philosophical ideas about the meaning of life, one should “cultivate their garden”—meaning, engage in productive, meaningful work that benefits oneself and the people around them.
Voltare, modern psychology, neuroscience and the ancient Greeks all agree what makes life worth living is, in the words of Dr McChristall "what can only be called resonance: the encounter with other living beings, with the natural world, and with the greatest products of the human soul—some would say, with the cosmos at large, or with God." Across all of recorded history we've been advised to focus on the process of living and not the destination. "If nothing matters to you but your own well-being, if you are utterly self-obsessed, not much will make you happy." Put simply, care about things other than yourself.
Where does this get me? Why am I finding it so hard to find my good life? Maybe life isn't a problem to be solved. Maybe I need to improve my journey and care less about where it's taking me.