How To Live A Good Life Series Plans

The goal with this series is to explore what philosophers and spiritual traditions throughout the ages have to teach us about how to live a good life.

A lot of the stuff I'll be exploring in this series is stuff I've already explored in the past, and in many cases, already internalized the lessons and applied them to my life.

For instance, I've been greatly influenced by Stoicism, and not in the "alpha bro" sort of way that Stoicism has been co-opted, but turning to the actual works of the Stoics and the practices and exercises developed thousands of years ago that still work so well that entire forms of psychotherapy were derived from them.

But I won't be looking at just Western philosophical traditions.

I'll also be exploring philosophies and spiritual traditions from all over the world and through all eras of recorded history.

How does one live a good life? is the big question at the core of this series. What are the practical tools and wisdom held within these traditions, and how can they be applied to modern living without having to commit oneself to one particular tradition, and without being appropriative or oppressive of those whose cultures originated the wisdom?

A lot of the practices and wisdom are things that should be revisited over and over again as we evolve. For instance, defining and clarifying our Values is something we should do regularly, to check that we're living in alignment with them, and to strategize ways we can live them more deeply.

This is not about privileging one philosopher or movement over any other. It's about discovering what we can learn from the most influential thinkers throughout history and from around the world.

I'll be sharing my notes as I go here on this digital garden.

Each entry in the series will start with a question that's related to the core question of the series.

How does one live a good life?

What does it mean to live a "good" life? - What does "goodness" mean? What can we learn from Aristotle's conception of Eudaimonia? From Confucian ideas of living harmoniously? What do various religious traditions say about "goodness"?

I don't know how long this series is going to be - I've got 17 questions to explore right now, but the thing about contemplating such deep questions is that they tend to lead to more questions.

I'm at a stage in my life where I'm figuring out what I want to do next with my life. And that includes a big re-evaluation of my beliefs. Middle-age seems to be a good time for that - Descartes did so when he was around the same age I am. Picked apart all of his beliefs, came to the conclusion the only thing he could be certain of was his own existence as a thinking mind, and then turned around and ignored his own epistemology trying to prove the existence of an all-knowing, all-good God.

My goal here is to bring the lofty ideals and theories of philosophy and spirituality back down to the "real" world. I've got a knack for connecting esoteric ideas with pragmatic insights and actions. I have an ability to intuitively grasp even the most complex ideas. My weak point is critical analysis, so another goal of this series is to improve my critical analysis, while also distilling the practical, actionable aspects of the various philosophies and spiritual traditions that I'll explore.

I'm not new to philosophy. I started my philosophy degree almost 20 years ago, and paused about halfway through when life went sideways on me. In the meantime, I spent most of my time consuming as much information as I could, including a whole lot of reading philosophy stuff.

I didn't just read philosophy, I practiced it. Not in the academic way of critiquing and expanding on various philosophical topics, but taking the pragmatic actions that various philosophers suggest and applying them to my life to see what happens.

Which is why, when I discovered Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) a number of years ago, I absolutely cackled because so much of CBT is derived from Stoic thinking, which has lots of overlaps with Buddhism.