By Jim Gubbins
Department of Interdisciplinary Studies

“What is a good life?”

Isn’t that a big, wonderful question? Isn’t that the question we should all be asking ourselves?

I strongly suspect that unless we have wandered into a philosophy class, we are not asking that question, nor will we find that question dominating the Blogosphere, Facebook, Twitter, or the print media. No, we are not asking, “What is a good life?” or even “How can I have a good life?” Instead, we are asking small questions that have to do with making our lives a little bit better or a little bit less bad: “How do I help my son have fewer run-ins with his teacher?” “What should I stop eating to bring my triglyceride levels down?” More frequently, we are not even articulating questions but rather feeling a nudge and jumping to conclusions and actions—glimpsing a low tire on our car, we drive to a gas station with an air pump; noticing our spouse’s exhaustion, we offer to cook dinner and do the dishes.

If we have not asked the big question of “What is a good life?” then it is hard to imagine that we have miraculously hit upon the answer, and it is even more improbable that we have discerned how to apply that answer to every detail of our lives.

So how do we live? How is it that we’re not faced with lots of biggish questions throughout the day, but easily move about the majority of the time without articulated questions, and the few questions that do arise tend to be the tiny sort, such as “Do I wear the blue or the white shirt today?” Put simply, we live mostly by habit and recognition.

In brief, our genes provide capabilities and predispositions that, combined with our general environment and personal experiences, form us into the persons we are and mold the lives that we have slowly accreted around ourselves. Growing scientific knowledge of how our brains are sculpted by experience reveals the awesome nature of our brains. Unfortunately, we often are alerted to this process only when it goes awry, as when a child has an astoundingly deficient vocabulary as the result of severe neglect or an adult raised in a culture of violence regularly turns to violence in response to a real or perceived challenge.

We slowly develop physical and psychological skills. We learn to walk, eat, talk, and the list goes on, and yet each skill we learn is not a universal, all-capable skill. While we learn to walk, we acquire a particular gait that is a mix of individual personality and local culture. While we learn to talk, we acquire our primary language or languages so that we speak them with a mix of personal vocal flair plus local accents and vocabularies. Learning to walk and talk is not learning all manners of walking or all languages. By habit we walk a certain way and talk a certain way. Inasmuch as we think in language, we think by habit of our primary language or languages.

When we look closely at sensations, perceptions, and feelings, we again see the force of habit. For example, once we learn to sense the distinction between good pain and bad pain, whether during stretching or running, we spontaneously sense the type of pain we feel and work toward the good pain and away from the bad. Regarding visual perception, neither babies nor adults have blank patches in their fields of vision due to uninterpreted phenomena. As our brains develop, whatever we see, we see by habit as something or other, and that something becomes more articulated and refined as we learn. For example, where a child has learned to see an object as a brick house with windows and doors, a knowledgeable adult has learned to see a federal-style house with classical motifs, and there is no going back to the child’s simple perception with its simple interpretation. We can do creative exercises in reimagining the house, but those reimaginings will be added to the habitual perception of that thing as a brick, federal-style house. While we build and refine some habits, we lose others, and some we do not acquire at all. For instance, while picking up the habit of seeing houses in detailed architectural terms, we may not have picked up the habit of discerning much about the flowers surrounding them: “Are those daisies, pansies, or peonies?” They look familiar but we may never have learned the names. We do not notice them much or care.

This matter of habits leads to a related aspect of ourselves—our spectacular ability of recognition. Repeated psychological experiments demonstrate that there are many thousands of faces, pictures, scenes, images, and words that we can recognize as familiar, as already experienced. However, we do not notice this remarkable ability of recognition because we do not always attach names, times, and locations to our recognitions and thus we instead notice, for example, how we forget the name that goes with the familiar face. We do not notice how almost everything we see, smell, and touch within a normal day is familiar, is something we recognize from having experienced it in some way before. With recognition, most choices are so easy and spontaneous that we do not recognize that we are making subconscious choices. Driving to a destination, we recognize all the landmarks and turns and just follow along. However, sometimes we get on our familiar route, spontaneously recognize and make all the correct turns, and then realize that we were not intending to take our familiar route to our familiar destination. Instead we were intending to go somewhere else, which we had forgotten about, and now we realize we are going the wrong way.

When we add together our habits of doing, thinking, feeling, sensing, and perceiving with our astonishing ability of recognizing most everything we experience in a normal day, we see why we are not asking the big question, “What is a good life?” or articulating many questions about making our lives better. Our lives are immediately intelligible to us, both what exists all around us and what we are to be doing. With our panoply of habits come habits of deeming things and actions as good and bad—this is something worth having and that is not, this is to be done and that is to be avoided, this is praiseworthy and that is shameful, and so on.

Stop—something looks fishy about this conception of us as almost prisoners of habit. If this conception is even close to correct, there is a looming paradox. How can it be that each of us has slowly evolved (and continues to evolve) into the myriad habits that constitute who we are and yet on all sides we are assaulted with a mind-boggling array of choices about how we might change our lives for the better? Through word of mouth and the media, we are encouraged to make changes in nearly every aspect of our lives. We are told how to change our diet to improve our health, lose weight, put on muscle, be environmentally responsible, or look better. We are told to reduce our stress through meditation, yoga practices, lavender candles, or assertiveness training. Not only is every dimension of our lives a target for change and improvement, but there are countless ways to change our lives, and the expansiveness of the possible changes ranges from tiny, such as reducing sugar consumption, to wholesale, such as giving up all our worldly possessions, moving into a monastery, and becoming a Franciscan monk. There would not be a chorus of folks urging us to change if no one ever changed.

Here is how the paradox vanishes. Yes, we are largely a bundle of habits, but even so there are frequent opportunities, openings, when we make changes—large or small—for what seems better. Most changes probably come about by a push-pull combination, but let us look at the pull and push separately.

You are at a friend’s house and are offered coffee. The coffee is especially good. You are pulled in. You find out the brand, buy it the next time you are out shopping, and voilà—you have changed coffee brands. Or, you are raised Anglican, grow up, and fall in love with a Jewish woman. She is a devout Jew and, with talk of marriage and children, it becomes clear that she is passionate about raising the children as devout Jews, which, having already fallen in love with a devout Jew, you think is fine. The kids are raised as observant Jews, and going to synagogue and celebrating Jewish holidays become important and meaningful parts of family life. Conversion to Judaism seems to be the sensible next step, and voilà— you have converted to Judaism. Through love, time, and good experiences, you gradually have been pulled into making this large-scale change.

You also can be pushed into change. During your yearly physical, your doctor tells you that though you are forty, you have the body of a sixty-five-year-old man, and if you want to live to see your children grow up, you need to change your diet and begin exercising. Because you trust your doctor and indeed want to see your children grow up, you begin to make the necessary changes in eating and physical activity. For another example, your corporate headquarters transfers your unit to South Carolina and you move there. Everything about your new life seems to work out except for church. None of the churches within driving distance is suited to your inclusive, liberal Protestant practices and beliefs. You do not join any church. Everyone in your family has gone from being a churchgoer to a non-churchgoer, and Sundays and holidays now are very different.

So let us recap to see if this all hangs together. Most of us, most of the time, are not asking big questions about the good life and how to live. Rather we live by habit and recognition, which develop continually and incrementally. Along the way, there are openings or opportunities when we are pushed and pulled into some kind of change—large or small—in addition to this gradual development. But some people do experience dramatic changes.

The vast majority of sudden, drastic changes do not make lives better but make them appreciably worse: death (for sure), physical or mental illness, injury, unwanted divorce, addiction, war, natural disaster, loss of employment, and so on. There are some sudden, drastic changes for the better, but usually these are folks getting back to normal or better than normal after a huge setback, such as a drug addict getting clean or an injured soldier realizing her mortality and becoming grateful for every day of life. William James makes a compelling case that sudden, positive conversion experiences are the result of long fermentation in the subconscious.

There is one last concern. If it is unusual for common folk to make sudden, positive, large-scale change, what about those giants, those watershed figures who provided the world with new paths and understandings of what it means to live a good life—Jesus, Muhammad, Plato, the Buddha, Confucius? Let us leave aside divine actions regarding all these figures (which may seem absurd to some and commonsensical to others). Each of these figures is a moral genius. Each was faced with significant social and moral dislocation and responded with an ingenious transformation in how to behave and understand one’s place in the cosmos. These are inventive reformers who nonetheless were not making a total break with their traditions.

So, for most of us, “What is a good life or what is a better life?” are not questions on our minds. However, if for some of us these are live questions, then we may be daunted by the superabundance of choices about what to change and how to change. My general advice is this: “Don’t worry.” First, change for the better is usually very slow and incremental. The only real choices we have are those few that we will actually stick with over the long term, and why these few stick, and not others, may be largely a mystery to us. Second, given how long it takes to change, our lives are relatively short. If it takes a decade to change thoroughly some aspect of ourselves for the better, and if we consider how few good decades an adult has, then we have a shot at making five or six major changes in our lives. It’s like going to an hour-long smorgasbord with a thousand dishes—we can eat only so much in an hour and enjoy it. If we happen to sample a number of dishes and then eat our fill of steak, lobster, apple pie, and a few other favorites, we are unlikely to feel much regret over missing out on full portions of Caesar salad, tiramisu, lasagna, and nine-hundred-and-something other dishes.

The third and final point is extremely important and would require more space than available to explain, which is this: Regardless of whether we are trying to better our lives by turning to positive psychology—which is coming from top researchers in psychology and pouring into the popular media—or the mainstream of any of the world religions or the mainstream of any of the world’s major philosophical traditions, we will likely end up in a similar place. They all are converging when it comes to what constitutes a meaningful, happy, good life and what vies against a good life. Good lives include lots of loving relationships, effective engagement with the broader community, a sense of purpose, gratitude, forgiveness, compassion, fairness, hope, honesty, courage, humility, self-discipline, humor, persistence, and a number of other common virtues. Narcissism, the grasping after money, power, and fame, and a host of other vices do not correlate with a good, happy life. Various psychological instruments administered in large-scale studies across the globe confirm this.¹

My advice, i.e., “Don’t worry, there are lots of worthwhile paths to the good life,” would probably strike most folks—professionals in these three fields and laypersons alike—as highly suspicious and unhelpful. What is wrong with me that I am not out there with the rest of the throng hawking some new self-help technique or the one, true religion? The vast, overlapping agreement about what constitutes a good life gets obscured because professionals in psychology, religion, and philosophy earn recognition and move along the conversation within their fields by detailing diversity and incommensurable claims, and most professionals in any one of these fields are not knowledgeable or interested in the other two disciplines and so do not see the overlap. At least Hindus, who are used to the idea that there are many legitimate paths to fulfillment, would probably agree with me—but then again, they would probably most likely find this a clichéd truism not worth mentioning.

This article is part of ASpect’s December 2009 issue on interdisciplinarity.

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FOOTNOTES1 For the last twenty-five years, Ed Diener has been one the primary research scientists on the topic of happiness as subjective well-being. Of late, he has been writing books and articles for a popular audience on his decades of research. Diener, along with his son, Robert Biswas-Diener, former students, and colleagues doing similar work across the globe have done a tremendous amount of cross-cultural work, most notably with his Satisfaction with Life Scale instrument, which has been administered around the world in over twenty languages. An accessible introduction to his work is a recent publication, Ed Diener and Robert Biswas-Diener, Happiness: Unlocking the Mysteries of Psychological Wealth (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2008).