You’re Not Supposed to Live Like This?

Hello, world.I’m an unemployed former Big Tech software engineer with 25 years of experience in the technology industry.And one of the strangest things about early retirement is discovering something I never seemed to have enough of while working:time.Free time gives you the opportunity to notice things you were too busy to notice before.And once I slowed down, I started thinking about a paradox that I find increasingly difficult to ignore.The Good Life ParadoxLook at the news. Scroll through social media. Listen to people talk about their lives.It seems like we’re living through crisis after crisis.A cost-of-living crisis.A loneliness crisis.A mental-health crisis.A birth-rate crisis.A meaning crisis.And underneath all of these is a broader feeling that something has gone fundamentally wrong with our society.Yet here’s the strange part.If you look at our material standard of living, we are living in an age of extraordinary abundance.The average American today has access to things that would have been unimaginable to even the wealthiest people a few centuries ago.Our homes are heated in the winter and cooled in the summer.We have clean running water and electricity.We can eat food from virtually anywhere on Earth, year-round.We have modern medicine.We have instant communication with people on the other side of the planet.And we carry, in our pockets, access to an astonishing percentage of humanity’s accumulated knowledge.A relatively ordinary person today can watch a movie, have dinner, talk to someone across the world, summon transportation, access a library containing millions of books, and ask an AI to explain quantum mechanics, all before going to bed.By almost any historical measure, we live incredibly comfortable lives.And yet...A huge number of people don’t seem particularly happy.So how can a civilization achieve unprecedented material abundance while simultaneously experiencing widespread loneliness, anxiety, dissatisfaction, and a crisis of meaning?Maybe the problem isn’t that we have too little.Maybe we’re optimizing for the wrong things.So What Actually Makes a Good Life?This question is obviously not new.Human beings have been asking it for thousands of years.Philosophers, religious teachers, prophets, and ordinary people have wrestled with the same fundamental question:What does it mean to live well?What’s fascinating to me is how much overlap exists among traditions that developed independently of one another.Different civilizations disagreed about countless things.But when you strip away the cultural details, many of them keep circling around a remarkably similar set of ideas.I would boil them down to three things.1. Meet Your Basic Material NeedsFirst, you need enough material security to survive and live with dignity.Food.Shelter.Clothing.Safety.A place to sleep.You don’t need a mansion.You don’t need a Lamborghini.You don’t need the newest iPhone.You need enough.And historically, there was also an interesting connection between work and human dignity.The idea wasn’t necessarily that you needed to spend every waking hour maximizing your economic output.It was that contributing through honest work could be part of living a worthwhile life.The goal was never supposed to be endless accumulation.It was supposed to be having enough to live well.2. Build Strong RelationshipsThe second ingredient is relationships.Family.Friends.Neighbors.Community.People you love and people who love you.People who depend on you.People you can depend on.A human being isn’t designed to exist as an isolated economic unit.We need other people.We need to serve other people.We need to care for them.We need to forgive them.We need to be forgiven.We need companionship.We need belonging.And perhaps most importantly, we need to feel that we matter to someone.You can have an enormous bank account and still be profoundly lonely.3. Find Meaning and PurposeAnd then there’s the big one.Meaning.Purpose.A reason to get out of bed in the morning.Different cultures have different names for this.Ikigai.Raison d’être.Calling.Mission.Faith.Purpose.The terminology changes, but the underlying idea is remarkably consistent.Human beings need something that makes their existence feel meaningful.