Of course, retirement is not about retiring. It’s about learning to live differently after you’ve been loosed from your professional obligations. The same goes for aging. It’s not about preparing to die. It’s about preparing to live appropriately in the face of death.
So after hearing Notre Dame professor Meghan Sullivan discuss these issues on a podcast with David Brooks, I picked up The Good Life: Reasoning Through the Big Questions of Happiness, Faith, and Meaning. Written by Sullivan and Paul Blaschko, the book’s ten chapters begin with action verbs: desire, live, take, work, love, wonder, take, struggle, contemplate, and prepare. I saw this as a promising start because my current action verbs are worry, fret, stew, and agonize. This book could represent an improvement in my approach.
The Introduction immediately caught me. The authors observe that we are goal-oriented creatures. We see ourselves on a ladder, constantly climbing in the realms of health, fitness, social status, and material success. We devote enormous amounts of time and energy to achieving these goals, and the labor itself reassures us that we are headed somewhere worthwhile.
As I read, I envisioned all of us standing over the parts of our lives as if they were machine pieces moving along a conveyor belt. We are assembly-line workers connecting some of the pieces, but we don’t know what the finished product is supposed to look like. We have our station on the line. We work earnestly. We tighten our bolts. But we’ve lost sight of the machine.
The authors argue that there is an answer to this myopia. It’s called philosophy. Aristotle understood its purpose. Interrogating your life and the lives around you should help you develop a philosophy aimed at making you a good person. Good people have something in common: they lead “a good life.” Defining the good life, and then embodying it, becomes the purpose of philosophy.
What strikes me about this lesson is that it applies to people of all ages and employment conditions. We have found the rare universal shoe that fits everyone’s feet.
Aspiring to the good life puts everything else into context. If I want ten thousand people to watch one of my YouTube videos in three days and become grouchy with my family because only three thousand people have bothered to admire me, I’ve lost my way. I’ve lost what the authors call telos, the aim that gives life meaning and direction. We have a target. Our actions are arrows. The arrows should hit the target.
Road rage, social-media disappointment, food hoarding, slothful TV bingeing, and compulsive internet shopping are arrows lying uselessly in the grass. Giving ourselves over to unruly passions becomes a recipe for misery. Happiness, by contrast, means hitting the target by living the good life. Aristotle called this goal eudaimonia.
Because I am Ashkenazi Jewish on my mother’s side and Roman Catholic on my father’s, I am familiar with versions of this framework. In Judaism, we aspire to a good life while wrestling with the evil inclination. God has given us enough reason and strength to move toward him. We meet God halfway, and God reciprocates.
Christianity tells a more severe story. We don’t merely fail to pursue the good life. We run from it. We love darkness and self-indulgence. We enjoy our little kingdoms of complacent narcissism, where the rest of humanity can suffer somewhere safely beyond the property line. But God is the Hound of Heaven. He hunts us down and drags us toward the fold while we scream and kick our legs. As Paul and John explain it, we are sinners in need of a divine rescue mission before we can turn around and walk the true path.
So reading The Good Life makes me anxious.
I agree with the general framework. Our lives should not be rooted in materialism, social status, and self-indulgence. We should seek to become good people. My anxiety begins with that old warning: the devil is in the details.
Can we reach the good life and find atonement and redemption through Aristotle’s philosophy? Through the similar structure of Judaism? Through Christianity? There are similarities, certainly, but there are also enormous differences. Take eschatology, a frightening word for “last things.” What exactly are the last things? Does death bring annihilation, the complete extinction of consciousness? Do we enter some larval underworld imagined by ancient Greek religion? Do we haunt Hades, Sheol, or Gehenna, neither happy nor tortured, but half-conscious, like someone slowly waking from a codeine dream?
Or is there a Judgment Day, a Lake of Fire, and a heavenly mansion where, as Aquinas notoriously suggested, part of the pleasure enjoyed by the blessed comes from witnessing the punishment of the damned? They mocked you on earth for your pious ways. Now look who’s laughing.
The devil is in the details.
So I am anxious.
But I read on.
I know the book ahead of me is not some saccharine self-help manual stuffed with fortune-cookie platitudes. Nor is it a New Age sales pitch assuring me that I can be spiritual and selfish at the same time because having my cake and eating it is apparently my God-given entitlement. Like any worthwhile book, The Good Life intends to challenge me. It will throw down a gauntlet. It will force me to examine my values and priorities.
Because Sullivan and Blaschko teach at Notre Dame and are practicing Roman Catholics, however, I don’t yet know whether their goal is to convert me in the specifically religious sense or in the more universal philosophical sense. Nor do I know whether universal moral improvement is sufficient once eschatology enters the room.
If I practiced a particular religious faith, I’m not sure I would be satisfied if people adopted my moral philosophy and stopped there. That would be like repainting an old car. You cleaned and stripped the surface. You repaired the body. You spread the Bondo, sanded it smooth, applied the primer, and congratulated yourself on the progress.
But you stopped.
No sealer. No base coat. No clear coat. No curing.
You understood Aristotle. You understood the arrows and the target. You may even have become a nicer person. But you failed to conform those principles to the required orthodoxy. You are an unfinished automobile sitting under fluorescent shop lights with enormous patches of Bondo across the doors.
You are an eyesore.
I am overcome with these thoughts, and I haven’t even finished the Introduction.
Apparently one thing that did not retire when I did was my compulsion to worry, fret, obsess, and make myself increasingly miserable while reading books designed to teach me how to be happy.
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