A short essay on the good life

Many people have a definition of what the good life means, but what does it really mean to live “a good life”? Is it helping others all of the time and not caring for yourself or Vic versa; being very selfish and having no remorse for others?

I think there are subjective things that each individual person will have, but I also think there are certain objective things that everyone should have.

The first thing should be your health. If you are not healthy and taking care of your body everyday, you are on board for a trip to the bottom because as your body degrades, as you get older, all of the unhealthy foods you have been eating and the months you have been putting off the gym will come back to haunt you. Eating healthy and working out is like cheap health insurance that adds up over time. Why wouldn’t you want to take advantage of that? And you see a lot of business people or people in general who work their butts off for money but they get a disease that ruins their quality of life.

There is this saying when people are younger, they use their health to get wealth and when they are older, they use their wealth to get back their health. It’s a circular logic and circular is illogical in this case.

And this isn’t just my opinion, there is amazing science to back this up. Weight lifting reverses the age of your telomeres, aerobic exercises help your brain function better, and etc. Even if you don’t have access to a gym, you can always run around your street.

The second thing you should have is money. Not just to tally it up, but just enough money to tell yourself,” I am financially independent”. You bread people who say ,”Money is the root of all evil”, but I don’t want to say that in a mean way, but money isn’t the root of all evil. Yes to a certain extent, I can see why people would say money is the root of all evil, but the lack of money should be the root of all evil. Just look at rich and poor countries.

Also there is amazing science by a psychologist Daniel Kahnmen, who says,

Your happiness will increase as you make more money, until you reach about $72,000 a year. Once you reach that point and your money increases, your happiness stagnates

(Not exact words) . That’s why I said earlier that you shouldn’t just tally up your money, it won’t make you as happy if you just do that. I think it has the opposite effect.

The next thing you should optimize in your life is your love. Not just in your romantic life, but also in your social life. Building long lasting relationships with people, I think, is more important in many ways than health. If I had a choice between being overweight and having good people around me vs being super fit and no good people around me, I would be overweight. There is a good book on social relationships named, “The Village Effect” by Susan Pinker, that talks about the amazing effects of relationships on your life.

If you line all of these up correctly, then you will get happiness. But I wouldn’t like to call it happiness, I will like to call it fulfillment. Happiness is an emotion and humans are emotional creatures, so we will experience a whole variety of emotions throughout our life, but a feeling of fulfillment will gives us a natural “high”.

Now this is my subjective opinion. There are probably more factors to this equation. We may never know what makes a good life 100% but we should always be on the adventure of looking for the truth.