There are some papers, essays, articles and books that stay in our minds for a long time. They keep coming back to our thoughts. This happens mainly because of a strong interest in the topic, great balance of author’s thinking, well written, reference to studies/data and invites deep reflection. A recent essay that I found very interesting to read and reflect on is “The good-enough life: how to live before the curtain falls” by Manfred Kets de Vries (distinguished clinical professor of leadership development, psychoanalyst). I’ve revisited this essay few times and would recommend to everyone. These are notes that got me thinking deeply and may get you there as well.
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* The first mistake we make about the good life is assuming it must be a happy one. Happiness, however, behaves like an unreliable employee: it arrives late, leaves early, and vanishes the instant we ask whether it is still on the premises.
* A life devoted entirely to duty soon becomes joyless; a life devoted entirely to pleasure becomes curiously empty, as many lottery winners and heirs discover when they learn that money can purchase almost anything except a self.
* The good life, then, concerns something beneath one’s mood: meaning, relationship, agency, contribution, curiosity, some negotiated peace with oneself, a way of inhabiting one’s own existence, the way a tenant inhabits a flat he intends to renovate later, indefinitely.
* The greatest obstacle to living well is rarely the hostility of the world. It is our magnificent, tireless capacity to misrepresent, to ourselves, what we actually want.
* Modern civilization has produced an elegant answer to the ancient question of the good life: more.
* The tragedy is that desire has no factory-installed stopping mechanism. What delighted us yesterday soon becomes part of the scenery, while our expectations quietly rise to erase the difference.
* Whose desire is this? Many of the things we want with such ferocity were never entirely ours.
* Achievement can become compulsive…
* Every human being lives simultaneously in two kinds of theatre productions: the external play of jobs, marriages, quarterly results, and an internal theatre whose cast includes parents, other family members, rivals, former lovers and assorted villains, several dead for decades and nonetheless maintaining excellent attendance.
* We recreate variations of unfinished emotional dramas, hoping unconsciously for a different ending, and receiving, with metronomic reliability, the
same one.
* A good life requires psychological archaeology: sifting which parts of our
lives represent genuine choice and which are old scripts in new costumes.
* Perhaps the good life begins when we become the authors of our lives rather than actors reciting lines handed down…
* Maturity is not the disappearance of our neuroses. It is becoming acquainted with them, knowing where they live, and revoking their keys to the house, even as they continue to ring the doorbell at inconvenient hours. This requires tolerating ambivalence: accepting that the same person can be loving and infuriating, admirable and disappointing.
* Mature love begins precisely where possession ends, at the humbling moment when we accept…
* A good relationship demands two seemingly contradictory capacities: attachment and separateness.
* Meaningful work gives shape to time and lets us deposit something of ourselves into the world before the account closes. But work has a dangerous habit of becoming one’s complete identity rather than expressing part of it. The danger begins the moment role and self, become indistinguishable.
* Remove the props, and an alarming question surfaces: who am I when nobody is obliged to return my calls?
* Work, however, should express a life. It should not consume it.
* Perhaps the rarest psychological achievement available to a modern human is learning the meaning of enough. But this sounds simple until we survey how many lives are organized around its opposite. The finish line moves because we keep moving it, telling ourselves each relocation is the last.
* But enough is not resignation dressed as humility. It is liberation from compulsive striving.
* Think of ‘meaning’ as resting on five interlocking dimensions: purpose, belonging, competence, control/ agency and transcendence.
* Purpose asks where I am going, and why. Belonging asks to whom I belong. Competence asks whether I can do something that matters, reasonably well. Control or agency asks whether I have authorship over my own life. Transcendence asks what connects me to something larger than myself. These dimensions need one another. Meaning is not a trophy to be displayed with the others; it emerges from the weave, not from any single thread.
* Beneath all five sit older questions. Who am I? To whom do I matter? What will remain when I am gone?
* Our happiness culture harbors a dangerous assumption: that suffering is evidence that something has gone wrong. But suffering is written into the original contract.
* We will lose people we love. Children will choose lives we did not design for them. Beauty will fade. No philosophy abolishes any of this.
* A good life is not a life without loss; it is a life capable of absorbing loss without losing, along with it, the capacity to keep living. Meaning does not abolish suffering, but it can alter our relationship to it.
* Become absorbed instead in people and purposes that genuinely matter, and happiness occasionally wanders in, uninvited, and stays a while.
* The good life requires not merely knowing what to pursue but, with equal clarity, what to relinquish.
* When time ceases to feel infinite, trivialities become more obviously, mercifully trivial.
* The Stoics, the existentialists and the psychoanalysts arrive, by different roads, at a shared insight: limits give a life its shape. If time were infinite, almost nothing would carry urgency. The good life therefore requires not merely knowing what to pursue but, with equal clarity, what to relinquish.
* Growing older well is, in large part, becoming an editor of one’s own life.
* We cannot defeat mortality. But we can participate in continuity.
* Erikson’s final developmental tension sits between ego integrity and despair. Can I look back at my own life, at its mistakes, its absurdities, its wrong turns, and nevertheless conclude: yes, that was my life, and I can accept it? Not because it all went well. Because it was, undeniably, lived.
* The capacity for purposeless absorption is one of the clearest signs that a person has escaped, at least temporarily, the tyranny of performance.
* People unable to laugh at themselves remain dangerously dependent on the fiction of their own importance, a fiction that requires constant maintenance and never quite passes an honest audit. The capacity to laugh at ourselves allows us to acknowledge our own foolishness without being annihilated by the acknowledgment.
* A life worth living is one in which we manage to love and be loved, become reasonably ourselves, remain curious, do work that means something to us, contribute beyond the perimeter of our own interests, tolerate life’s inevitable losses without being frozen by them, retain some capacity for play, and look back with more gratitude than regret.
* The good life is not the perfect life; a perfect life would, on inspection, be close to intolerable. There would be no surprises, no foolish mistakes, no improbable recoveries, and no stories worth telling at dinner…contains people we should never have met and people without whom the rest of it is unimaginable. It contains roads not taken, and several roads we took and deeply regret.
* What makes a life good is not that everything turns out well; almost nothing, on close inspection, does. It is that, gradually and with considerable resistance, we become capable of turning toward reality instead of away from it.
* Then, inevitably, the curtain begins its descent. There is no negotiating an extension with the management, however senior one’s title.
* The tragedy is that the play ends. The comedy is how much of the run we spent anxiously reading the reviews instead of performing the play.
* Perhaps a life worth living consists, finally, in discovering this early enough to stop rehearsing for an audience that was never there, and to start, before the lights come down, actually enjoying the performance.
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