Five Steps to Understanding the "Good Life"

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What does it mean to live the “good life”?

This question has consumed me all my life. I think I am somewhat closer to the answer today than I was when I was a child, but I haven’t completely cracked the code yet. Maybe that’s not even possible.

One of the experiences that have helped me develop my thoughts on this question was my involvement with the Canadian Positive Psychology Association (CPPA). Along with a handful of other people, I founded the CPPA in 2012. We organized many successful events, such as conferences, workshops, and a webinar series, all of which allowed me to interact with people who shared my passion for understanding how to best promote “positivity” and what makes life most worth living.

But over the years, something struck me as problematic. In many of the conversations I had with people about the good life, their thoughts often seemed to me to be overly sanguine. Does being happy mean that you should never be sad? I don’t think so. Does being optimistic mean it’s always counterproductive to be pessimistic? Um, no. Is the good life made up of exclusively positive experiences and no negative experiences? Nope. But many people I interacted with seemed to think along these lines. As much as I respected their views, in my own mind, the situation appeared to be more nuanced.

I decided to try to organize my thoughts on this topic and ended up publishing a paper with two colleagues in which we developed “The Balance Framework” for understanding positive psychology and the nature of the good life. The framework outlines five ways to think about positivity in a balanced way, and it has structured my thinking in a number of subsequent publications. The five components of the Balance Framework are presented below.

1. Balance as tempered view

This suggests that seemingly positive phenomena can have negative aspects to them and vice versa. For example, love can involve heartache, and heartache can foster growth.

2. Balance as mid-range

This suggests that positive phenomena may be best experienced at moderate as opposed to high levels. For instance, optimism is great unless your optimism is so intense that you lose your college tuition payment by betting it all on black at the roulette table.

3. Balance as complementary

This suggests that positive (and negative) phenomena operate together in generating desirable outcomes. For example, being engaged at work may lead to work-life conflict unless the engagement is coupled with conscientiousness.

4. Balance as contextual sensitivity

This suggests that whether phenomena are regarded as relatively positive or negative may depend on the situation in which they occur. For instance, forgiveness is an apparently desirable character trait that may lead to high-quality relationships, but it is less likely to do so if someone is with an abusive partner.

5. Balance among levels of consciousness

This suggests that it is important to appreciate both conscious and unconscious aspects of seemingly positive phenomena to generate positive outcomes. For example, by short-circuiting automatic responses, mindfulness may sometimes undermine adaptive unconscious processes.

In subsequent posts, I’ll discuss each of these five forms of balance more thoroughly. My thoughts on the nature of what is positive continue to evolve, but I hope these thoughts will help you refine your own ideas about the good life and how to achieve it.

My views on this matter would not have become sharpened if it wasn’t for the conversations I had with others whose comments were discrepant from my own vaguely developed ideas. I thank them for their influence on me. If you think the ideas I present warrant further development, I invite you to contact me to share your thoughts. With your help, perhaps I will fully understand the nature of the good life by the time I reach old age.