How to Be a Good Person
Hello and welcome to rewilding philosophy. Wherever you are, I hope you are doing well. While I continue to be cocooned (🐛), this piece somehow really wanted to come alive. It expresses a deep shift in my thinking and I’m eager for you to read this. You'll dive into ideas that just might spark new ways of thinking about your own life and your own transformation towards healthy people and a healthy planet.
While the title is about how to be a good person, I want to start somewhere else. Namely, with the question of how to live a good life, which for me was not just the starting point for the question in the title of this letter, but also has been the most important question for the past 15 years of my life. But more on that later.
The good life.
What’s the good life for you?
The question is at the core of philosophical inquiry and one that has been debated more than likely anything else. At its essence, the question of the good life pushes us to reflect and diffract on our values, priorities, and the legacies we hope to build.
In pursuit of the answer, we can start by looking into how philosophers across time and space have come to understand the good life.
How to Live a Good Life
The main schools of thought—leaving out the nuances at this point—I want to briefly introduce, are the following nine:
Aristotelian Ethics or Virtue Ethics: The good life is achieved by cultivating virtues like courage and wisdom to attain balance and fulfillment.
Utilitarianism: The good life maximizes happiness for the greatest number by evaluating actions based on their outcomes.
Deontological Ethics: The good life adheres to moral duties and principles, such as honesty and justice, regardless of the consequences.
Epicureanism: The good life involves moderate pleasure, knowledge, friendships, and simplicity to avoid unnecessary desires.
Stoicism: The good life aligns with nature and reason, focusing on internal resilience and virtuous character.
Existentialism: The good life is about creating one's own meaning and purpose with authenticity and personal responsibility.
Indigenous philosophies: The good life is entwined with nature's balance and involves caretaking and respecting the earth.
Confucianism: The good life is achieved through moral integrity, social harmony, and fulfilling society's roles and responsibilities.
Buddhism: The good life involves ending suffering and reaching enlightenment through mindfulness and ethical living.
When we try to find common denominators in these different schools of thought, one such denominator that distinguishes them is that one is oriented towards finding the good life in the inner world of the self or finding it in the outer world in service of others.
Most advice about how to live a good life that we are given in the Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic (WEIRD) world revolves around the former. Which is only natural, taking into account that our philosophies revolve around the role of the individual.
As Tara Isabella Burton says in her book Self-Made,
“the idea that we are self-makers is encoded into almost every aspect of Western contemporary life. We not only can but should customize and create and curate every facet of our lives to reflect our inner truth. We are all in thrall to the seductive myth that we are supposed to become our best selves.”
So, obviously, trying to find the good life within a self seems to be the right question to ask.
Yet, the question about the good life, though so common throughout the world, encourages us to chase after the shiny trinkets of existence—happiness, success, comfort.
One key experiment to understand the trouble that comes from this chase was conducted by psychologists Mauss et al. In their study, they hypothesized that valuing happiness might make people less happy and satisfied with life. The research found that individuals who highly valued happiness or were primed to think about its importance often reported lower levels of happiness and satisfaction with life post-experiment compared to those who did not focus on happiness. It appeared that when people put too much emphasis on achieving happiness, they became preoccupied with their current mood, leading to disappointment when reality doesn’t meet their high expectations.
The paradox seemed to be that the focus on happiness leads to unhappiness.
Finding happiness then is not achieved in itself, but rather it is the side effect of a particular set of ongoing life experiences. I argue that it is the same with the good life.
The Shift
For the past 15 years, I have asked myself the question of how to live a good life adding the phrase “in the context of the Anthropocene / polycrisis / metacrisis / collapse (whatever seemed the appropriate language of the mess we are in).” I am now realizing how this question—while it may have been right at one point—seems like I have been asking the wrong question. The focus of that question was about me. In context. But yet, me.
At the same time, it always felt like I knew well enough how to live a good life, but I didn’t know how to do that well facing the metacrisis. I was lucky enough to experience a world in which the Anthropocene was still a marginal topic and didn’t make it to my small-town existence, so making it all about me didn’t seem like a problem, but like something that was encouraged by the social norms I grew up with.
While I somehow felt like I knew how to live a good life, once I became aware of the context—like climate change, species extinction—it made it really difficult for me to do so. The resulting narrative was, and I think it still is on a societal level, that these “things” are standing between us and the good life; so we need to overcome them, get rid of them, manage, eliminate, and fight them, and eventually, we need to win.
But as Luis de Miranda points out, building on Gottfried Leibniz's idea of the “compossible,” philosophical health means that our own possibilities don’t diminish the possibilities of others—for example, that of the polar bear.
Asking about the good life and adding “in context” is like adding an extra limb that no one needs or wants but that still somehow we drag along.
So, lately, I've started to wonder if the pursuit itself is a bit of a trap, a distraction from simply being good. It’s too easy to get tangled in the web of achieving, relentlessly chasing ideals dangled in front of us like carrots on the stick of consumer culture. We forget that maybe, just maybe, the secret to the good life is found in not trying to live a good life.
Funny thing is, the more I excavate the layers of what the good life means, the more it feels like it circles back on itself, just to bite itself in the butt. Everything I do becomes a means to the end of the good life. Living a life guided by the question of the good life becomes daunting.
I am not saying we therefore shouldn’t ask it, which is probably what Tolstoy would suggest. In his book "Confessions," he warns us against pursuing those deep existential questions intellectually and rationally because, as he reasons, eventually those means are insufficient to answer them.
I think nonetheless, we can try.
Yet, I’d say that the question about the good life is not the most helpful.
Instead, I think—and finally, I come to the title of this letter—the better question to ask is “How do I become a good person?” While some of the philosophies I mentioned in the beginning would answer the question of how to live a good life by “you live a good life by becoming a good person,” the focus and the ultimate question change.
What if being a good person is not the means to an end but the end itself?
Maybe back then those philosophers meant it differently.
But I do believe that the frames and narratives that we are embedded in in the WEIRD world are such that the question around the good life automatically gets associated with a focus on the self and the individual inner—rather than the other and the collective inner (and outer).
The Relational Nature of Being a Good Person
When I ask how I can be a good, or at least a better person, the question itself is somewhat misaligned with the context: the families, cultures, more-than-humans, and histories that influence us all.
While we have agency to be better, our agency happens in relationships. Agency is not an isolated property of individuals but a relational phenomenon. Look how much agency a virus has/d compared to us. A virus exerts its agency not in isolation but through its interactions with hosts, environments, and other organisms. Its "success" or "impact" is contingent on the networks of relationships it engages with. Similarly, human agency is not a solitary endeavor but emerges within the web of relationships that constitute our existence.
To ask how to be a "good" or "better" person, then, is to inquire into the quality of our relationships—with other humans, with more-than-human beings, and with the ecosystems and histories that shape us.
Being "good" is not about adhering to fixed moral rules or achieving a static ideal. Instead, it is about participating in the ongoing processes of relational becoming. It is about how we contribute to the flourishing of the relationships we are part of. This means recognizing that our actions, intentions, and even our identities are co-created within these relational dynamics. We are not autonomous agents imposing our will on the world; we are participants in an unfolding of life.
Just as we can’t strategize a good life through a mood board, a five-year plan, or by excel-sheeting our way into it, we also can’t strategize how to be a good person.
To be a "better" person, then, is to cultivate attentiveness to these relationships. It is to ask: How do my actions affect the well-being of others, human and non-human? How do I contribute to the health of the ecosystems I am part of? How do I honor the histories and cultures that have shaped me while also being open to transformation?
Or as Nora Bateson asks, “Who can you be when you are with me?”
This requires humility because it acknowledges that we are not the sole authors of our lives. It also requires creativity because it invites us to imagine new ways of being in relationships that foster mutual flourishing. And it requires what
recently called Relational Accountability."Relational accountability would come into your kitchen and tell you that a plastic carton of milk that you use to add a certain taste to your coffee has a history.
It has a story, and that story includes a local shop. It includes a supplier. It includes a source origin—a farm of some kind, probably a factory farm.
And prior to that, there'll be an animal with their story, probably a cow.
And there'll be some kind of machinery... milking it... in perpetuity.
Relational accountability says you're accountable for all of those things, not just whether or not you recycle your plastic bottle."
I can’t answer what it means to be good. It’s obviously an ongoing question—a lived question that gets answered again and again.
The nature of the question, though, entails that goodness is not a fixed state but a quality of how we engage with the ongoing flow of life, that to be good is to be responsive, adaptable, and generative in our relationships, that we are both shaped by and shaping the world around us, and to take responsibility for the ways we participate in this co-creative process. In this light, the question of how to be a better person shifts from a focus on individual moral achievement to a focus on relational care. It becomes less about "am I good?" and more about "how are we good together?"
Being a Good Person Without Burning Out
Research shows that our life satisfaction dramatically increases when we help other people. When we shift our focus from caring primarily for ourselves, something Ken Wilber calls “egocentric” towards others—ideally cosmocentric.
Related to the idea of care and service though, there is always the concern that comes from over-caring, the picture of the working mum who does nothing but give, forgets herself and her health, and always puts others first. Such a lifestyle can only persist if we are Mother-Theresa-level enlightened, which most of us are not.
Equating how to be a good person, though, with how to care for others is oversimplified.
Being a good person might also entail going to a yoga class and sipping a martini with friends afterward (to stay with the clichés).
Life is a continuous interplay of giving and receiving, action and rest, self-care and care for others. To over-caretake, to the point of neglecting one’s own health and well-being, is to disrupt this balance. It risks turning care into a form of self-erasure, which is neither sustainable nor truly relational. True care is not a zero-sum game where one must choose between self and others.
So this shift from "me" to "we" is not a denial of the self but an expansion of it that includes others.
As
ibraun from recently said,“Interdependence means that if I want health and well-being for the planet, then I have to want it for myself. That means tending to my nervous system, managing cortisol levels, and listening to my body. That's foundational to the practice of being able to listen to the body of the earth. It's mutual. It must be. It always has been.”
...If we want health and well-being for the planet, we must also want it for ourselves...
So, when we ask: "How could I be a better person?” what we are really meaning to ask is how might we give enough attention to that part of us, until it becomes us. We start to see as a good person would see, with compassion, curiosity, and openness. We begin to move as a good person would move, with intention, grace, and responsiveness to the needs of the moment.
We are inquiring into how we might align ourselves more fully with the relational, process-oriented nature of existence.
This alignment begins with giving attention to the parts of ourselves that are often overlooked—our needs, our boundaries, our joys, and our vulnerabilities. By tending to these aspects of ourselves, we begin to embody the qualities of a "good person" not as an external ideal but as an internalized way of being.
In this way, the question of how to be a good person becomes an invitation to deepen our engagement with the world and with ourselves, to expand our sense of self, to the entanglements with all things, and to participate fully by paying attention.
Share this letter with a friend or loved one who would benefit!
This is all so brilliant and insightful! I especially love this: ..If we want health and well-being for the planet, we must also want it for ourselves... In Gaia Psychology, self-regulation is seen as an expression of Gaian homeostasis. It’s a portal for deepening that relationship, making us better advocates, opening ourselves to her higher intelligence. Similarly, in Buddhism, exchanging self for other is a key to cultivating compassionate wisdom, which realizes “self” is nothing but others, or non-self. Thank you for the skillful way you share philosophy - so helpful!
Thank you for writing this and for weaving me in! I resonate with so much of this. Happiness, a good life, indeed a life worth living, is what happens when we're loving others, creating, connecting, and practicing real presence. I appreciate all the threads you wove into this, and am grateful for these reminders today.