by Martin Butler
The expression ‘Live your best life’ is very much in vogue. It appears more than 3 million times in Instagram posts, which are no doubt full of pictures of smiling attractive 20-somethings completing amazing sporting feats, strolling along glorious beaches or doing exciting things in exotic places. Working 12 shifts delivering parcels for Amazon presumably doesn’t make the grade. As with many other inspirational (or is it aspirational) sayings that pepper the internet, perhaps we should dismiss this expression as just part of the froth produced by internet influencers desperate for our attention. But what does its popularity say about our times? Let’s look beyond the predictable healthy lifestyle stuff and try to actually make sense of it as a philosophical idea. After all, if interpreted generously, it does have a certain philosophical pedigree.
To start with, what does best actually mean? It very much depends on how we view human beings. Regarded in a narrowly hedonic way, where the only things that matter are pleasure and pain, our best life would be one where we avoid as much pain and experience as much pleasure as possible. This is clearly implausible for many reasons, one being the conclusion of Nozick’s powerful thought experiment: few would regard their best life as being permanently hooked up to an ‘experience machine’ which eliminated pain and provided you with nothing but delightful pleasure. The passive experiencing of pleasure would not be enough. A best life surely requires that we participate in meaningful activities which lead to fulfilment and flourishing, a point which tends to lead to a more individualistic notion. Most people are roughly similar in terms of what they find pleasurable and painful; masochists excepted, human beings tend to find physical injury painful and sweet food pleasant. This is not the case, however, with regards to living a fulfilling life. I personally wouldn’t find a life dedicated to martial arts, rock climbing or running marathons fulfilling, but for many these activities are deeply fulfilling. So is there something distinctively modern about the individualism implicit in living your best life?
Contrast this notion of individual fulfilment with the more traditional notion of living a good life that goes back to Plato and Aristotle. Would living their best life make any sense to a medieval peasant, an Apache warrior, a Viking trader or a 19th century fisher girl? Probably not, at least not in the way that we understand the expression. However, the idea of living a good life according to the particular beliefs or codes embedded within those cultures, probably would make sense. In modern parlance your best life is something specific to you, a distinctive ‘life journey’ that would allow you to find joy and fulfilment but not necessarily others. Your potential is unique to you, and will only be actualised within a distinctive kind of life tailored to your specific requirements. This is in stark contrast to this more general idea of a good life per se, which would involve living up to certain standards and developing certain qualities which could apply to anyone. Being a good Christian, Jew or Muslim or any other religious believer, a good soldier, a good manager, a good mother etc. involves displaying virtues that are general and apply to whomever happens to inhabit these roles. To a significant extent, the role would define how the person acts rather than, as the radical individualist would have it, the person defining the role
What are we to make of this? One way of understanding this kind of individualism holds that we moderns are different in some fundamental way from people of previous eras, that we, unlike our forbearers who were hamstrung by a set of archaic and now redundant beliefs, now have the potential to escape the pre-existing cultural roles that have been laid down for us. As perfectly autonomous and rational self-contained units with the inner resources to make our own meaningful life, provided we have will power and clarity of thought, we can strike out in any direction we choose and only though choosing our own path is true human fulfilment possible. Although not usually stated in such bald terms, this interpretation is often implicit in much modern debate. Somewhat different versions of it are to be found in the ideal of the ‘sovereign individual’ beloved of libertarians, or at the outer reaches of child-centred education theory.
This approach should be rejected as incoherent simply because there is no reason why we should believe that we are somehow fundamentally different from previous generations. It also labours under the illusion that we can transcend our deeply social nature. Although it may be tempting to think that buried deep down is a more natural self, unsullied by the corrupting influences of culture and society, a child without culture or socialization, far from being a pure untainted being, is simply feral. This faulty conception can lead us to believe that we can make sense of ‘a best life’ quite apart from the social, cultural, political, and economic conditions in which every individual lives. It’s a kind of bootstrap version of a best life, in which anything is possible provided you only have the will to succeed. It is indeed possible to escape the poverty of the favela or the gang life of the sink estate, but the odds will be massively stacked against you. Advocates of the bootstrap version of a best life often deploy a pernicious logic to those who succeed against the odds, a logic that is very evident on social media. The argument is that if one individual can ‘make it’ then anyone can, and if you don’t it must be because you’re making the wrong choices or not trying hard enough. The absurd conclusion of this seems to be that if everyone in poverty simply tried harder there would be no poverty. Certainly it would be naive to think that some level of material well-being is unnecessary for a best life, but of course it would not be sufficient. We cannot ignore the kind of social and economic structures into which we are born.
Rejecting this view does not mean we must reject completely a more sophisticated kind of individualism that could potentially allow us to give a coherent interpretation to the irritating phrase ‘living your best life’, but we must start by acknowledging the fact that we are all creatures of our times, enmeshed in the culture and practices of the societies in which we live. The life of an Apache warrior, for example, is closed to us simply because that world no longer exists and we cannot recreate the meanings it presupposed from our own inner resources. We should also note that it is of course quite possible that the world we inhabit today with the pre-eminent value its gives to science, technology, and indeed ‘the individual’, will also eventually collapse – or at least change in ways we may not be able to imagine or foresee. There is no reason to regard our era as special.
But from within our own culture, and with the acceptance of the provisos mentioned above, there are some possible ways to make sense of a best life. Take the Heideggerian notion of an authentic (as opposed to an inauthentic) life. This is a big topic, but roughly an inauthentic life is one in which we lose ourselves completely in the average everydayness of our culture. To some degree this is inevitable for everyone. It is a form of life in which we seek distraction and escape though what Heidegger describes as ‘idle talk’, ‘curiosity’ and ‘ambiguity’, a life dominated by what he calls ‘the they’ (das man), or what we might ordinarily call ‘the crowd’. It means we connect to our own heritage superficially, all subtleties are levelled out and only the most obvious contours are recognised. Authenticity, on the other hand, is a clear-eyed determination to face the reality of our life – for Heidegger it meant facing the angst of human existence. We need to relate this to our own individual circumstance and to survey the options bequeathed by our culture. Steven Mulhall describes this “as seizing ..[our] heritage in a manner which discloses its true lineaments; it means reacting against one’s heritage in order to uncover it properly, reclaiming it.”[1] We should note here that authenticity does not require us to be special or different in any obvious way. A determination to stand out from the crowd is in fact often evidence of being under the spell of ‘the they’ as much as blind conformism. Authenticity is likely to be more about savouring the ordinary rather than chasing novelty.
A best life cannot result from a series of distractions that might only titillate for a time. Travelling the world and having amazing experiences can surely be life-changing, but it is we who do the life changing, not the amazing experiences, which will affect different people in different ways. In any case, it’s not clear from any of this why exactly one would or should prefer to live an authentic life. Authenticity is an achievement, it’s not something you just fall into, and if an inauthentic life is easier, then the argument in favour of authenticity would probably need to have something of the thinking behind Mills claim that “It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied.” The notions of personal fulfilment and authenticity do not completely coincide but there must surely be some common ground. Authenticity is about truth, honesty and seriousness, and it is surely difficult to conceive of a genuinely fulfilling life as one based on illusion and superficiality. Certainly, easy satisfaction is not necessarily the hallmark of a fulfilled human being. One reason we tend to be repelled by Nozick’s experience machine is surely that the experiences it provides cannot be regarded as genuine. What is illusory and superficial is, of course, not always obvious, and ultimately has to be a matter of judgment.
The Heideggerian picture of authenticity does not consider the importance of role models. If we admire other human beings whose lives demonstrate authenticity it becomes obvious why we might prefer to be a Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied. An impressive human being we encounter in the flesh (or even one we read about) will influence us more than a philosophical tract on how to live a good life, even though it may be difficult to put our finger on exactly why we do find them impressive. A human being cannot be reduced to a series of prescriptions or rules. The Aristotelian ideal of the phronimos is surely helpful here. The phronimos is someone who has practical wisdom, someone who can successfully navigate a path through life by good habits and good judgement and act as an exemplar to others. Ideally this will be our parents, but of course this is certainly not always the case. This sounds like the opposite of individualism. Surely the key premise of living your best life is that it is your life, not the life of an exemplar no matter how impressive. But this only works as an argument if we adopt the crude bootstrap form of individualism with its claim that we can become a fully formed human being entirely from our own inner resources, denying the role of a cultural heritage, or regarding it wholly in negative terms. We might attempt to mechanically copy our role models as children, but as we mature we will become unique individuals while nevertheless absorbing many features of those we look up to. This can be a self-conscious process and also something that occurs naturally and unconsciously. And as Steven Mulhall suggests, the best way to connect to our heritage is through a kind of critical reflection from within it. It can never be a mechanical reproduction of what went before, since circumstances change. We need to respond to the changed circumstance, both individually and societally, with what we have learnt from the ‘true lineaments’ of our heritage. Judgement after all is all about dealing with unique circumstances without recourse to a set of fixed rules. This is what must carry a culture forward. There is no formal articulation of what exactly it is that continues, but we recognise it when we see it, and we must also recognise that sometimes what continues is an awful caricature rather than the true lineaments of a heritage. Cultures, like individuals, can go wrong.
At an individual level at least, what we can learn from this is that a best life is probably something we need to work at, and is unlikely to be easy or happen overnight. Living authentically, being able to cope well with the world around us, can only be achieved with practice, care and a certain sensitivity. And here we don’t just have in mind practical tasks, but judgements concerning the emotional, social and intellectual aspects of our lives. We might think that we have drifted away from any form of individualism but that is not the case. In any meaningful sense, individuality can never be a kind of Tower of Babel of mutually incomprehensible voices all doing their own thing. It has to be more like variations on a theme; unity within diversity. This I think is how we must understand our best life.
[1] Mulhall, S. 1996 Heidegger and Being and Time, Routledge, London , p170