This essay explores whether there is a general definition of the good life applicable cross-culturally to everyone, yet sufficiently open to permit infinitely idiosyncratic personal experience and lifetimes of inquiry. The essay proposes that four goods-good money, good work, good friends, and good questions-make up the good life, if they are pursued in the proper rank order of relative priority and with the proper blending. Readers are invited to test their own intuitive or explicit sense of the good life and the path toward it against the perspective offered here.
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