The Greeks spent copious amounts of time dialoguing (talking) and writing about the Good Life. They didn't use that term the way we do today. We generally say that someone is living the Good Life when they are well off financially, appear to have a pleasant existence, or everything is just going their way. Not so, the Greeks. Consider Socrates:
Socrates, so far as we know, never wrote anything. All that we know about this strange, bare-footed man, we learn from Plato. Nonetheless, Socrates is considered to be the premier philosopher of the western world. It's not as though there were no philosophers before him, but it says a lot that they are lumped together in a group known as the pre-Socratics!
Among other things, Socrates believed that the unexamined life is not worth living. That's another way of saying that people ought to look at themselves carefully and try to understand why they think and behave in the ways that they do.
Socrates was quite persistent (and insistent) on this subject, and he even started using a method of questioning, the Socratic method, to point out flaws in other people's beliefs, suppositions, and reasoning. He became known as "a kind of a gadfly" around Athens, and because he wouldn't back off, they eventually voted that he would have to drink poison and kill himself. (You can read all about that in The Trial and Death of Socrates.)
Even though Socrates wound up dead, his ideas lived on through the writings of Plato, then Aristotle, and so on. These writers became obsessed over the topic of what type of life constituted the Good Life. But, like I said before, this blog isn't about the Greeks.
Every one of us, whether we've expressed it or not, have some ideas about what constitutes a Good Life. This blog is going to be about my attempt to define what my Good Life looks like. Hopefully, I'll be able to do that without having to chug a mug full of hemlock.
