We Know a Good Life When We See It

This essay now lives at a new home

I. Recognizing a Good Life

We know what a well-lived life feels like. Not the spikes of pleasure or the troughs of pain, but the rhythm of something sustained—the steady contentment of good days becoming good weeks. It's what we should strive for, because it feels right and balanced. It doesn’t require a manifesto or a flawless record. You see it in how someone shows up for others, how they behave when there’s nothing to gain. It doesn’t belong to any party, style, or identity. It’s just good. And we've forgotten how to name it.

In an earlier piece, I argued that institutions, lacking a coherent moral vision, defaulted to technocratic optimizations—the tyranny of efficiency. This is a continuation of that line of thought. It’s an attempt to reclaim the language of virtue, not for judgment, but for recognition. We still know what a good life looks like. But somewhere along the way, we became afraid to name it and afraid of seeming judgmental, regressive, or closed-minded. That fear has cost us the clarity we need to reject technocracy’s methods when they don’t suit us. 

II. Fluency ≠ Virtue

We've lost the ability to describe a good life partly because the word 'virtue' now feels scolding or suspicious, warped by performance across the ideological spectrum. On the right, it’s often conflated with purity or control, invoked to punish or exclude. 

In certain educated spaces, linguistic mastery has overtaken moral formation. If someone can speak in specific academic terms about justice, power, identity, or trauma, they can behave however they want. Cruelty might even be celebrated, so long as it’s pointed in the right direction. Humility, forgiveness, and patience have been devalued because they aren’t legible as strength.

This wasn’t a conspiracy, and it wasn’t uniquely leftward. In some cases, it was a natural instinct to fight "strength with strength" in the face of a belligerent far right. But it was still a cultural failure. When words become currency and identity becomes insulation, we end up with a moral culture that is oddly hollow: full of language, thin on virtue.

This isn’t a veiled appeal to nostalgia, normativity, or conformity. It’s an honest attempt to say: some ways of living nourish, others erode.

If we want to recover anything meaningful, we have to rebuild our sense of what a good life actually looks like. And we have to do it without shame, without tribal reflex, and without requiring moral perfection. The goal isn’t to police, but to offer something better to imitate.

And maybe that’s the simple truth beneath it all: we weren’t confused. We were cowardly. The educated class is full of people living lives centered on virtue, reluctant to name the virtues they practice for fear it will exclude others. We’re scared that naming virtue will seem passé, or that calling out cruelty dressed in fluency will cost us status. So we let fluency stand in for character and stayed out of the fray.

But a culture built on fear can’t sustain a moral core.

III. Agency vs Structural Excuses

There is a necessary insight in the idea that behavior is shaped by systems. Poverty, violence, racism, and instability warp people’s choices, and all of these traumas may alter behavior. These are important facts that should inform policy.

But it is a short step from that insight to something more corrosive: the belief that people are no longer responsible for what they do. That if the system is to blame, the individual is morally exempt. We’ve seen this logic take hold in how we talk about addiction, violence, crime—even abuse. Therapy-speak gets weaponized. People list the reasons they are the way they are, with no interest in improving. And we instinctively bristle when anyone suggests that those who have suffered can also cause harm.

Compassion does not require the erasure of agency. In fact, it demands its preservation. It requires believing that people can change, and are capable of responsibility and growth. To deny someone moral agency because of their circumstance is abandonment. It signals that when something goes wrong, we should give up. I can’t think of a worse lesson.

We need a moral language that names wrongdoing without casting people aside. A language that expects more because it believes we are more than what’s been done to us.

IV. Recovering Virtue – The Shape of the Whole Life

A good life develops a person across multiple dimensions. It seeks balance. What we once called virtue was not a narrow lane. It was an orchestration of a cultivated life marked by responsibility, moderation, and depth across many roles.

We’ve inherited many of the conditions that historically enabled virtue—stability, affluence, access, mobility—but we’ve lost the clarity on virtue itself. The culture of technocratic primacy rewards singularity: total, often maniacal, dedication to one domain at the expense of the rest. It tells us to pick a lane and optimize it, even if it costs us our bodies, our relationships, or our communities. 

But real virtue has no lane. It isn’t singular. It emerges from the confluence of the many roles a person inhabits—and neglect in one weakens the whole. Greatness in one domain does not excuse absence in all the others.

Singular focus is not a human trait. It is a machine trait. Human life is fragmented on purpose. We are meant to be many things: parent, friend, worker, neighbor, mentor, pupil, citizen. 

This matters not only for individuals, but for institutions. Institutions inherit the moral muscle of the people inside them. When that muscle atrophies, and when clarity about the good is abandoned in favor of passive neutrality, they begin to organize around liability, optics, and measurable proxies. This is rarely a result of malice and corruption. Mostly it reflects a loss of confidence. In that void, metrics proliferate. Policy reflexively avoids substance and defaults to procedure. It becomes more important to be measurable and defensible on the metrics alone than to be just or right.

This dynamic plays out across domains. Public agencies prioritize lawsuit avoidance over public service. Hospitals focus on billing codes because care is difficult to quantify. Schools chase behavioral compliance and test scores over actual learning and moral formation. Even private companies that begin with a clear mission and useful product can be reduced to ad slop by funders that focus on nothing but top line revenue and an ecosystem of leaders that are unable to reject this simplistic and short-sighted logic.

These are not discrete failures. They are predictable outcomes of a cultural drift that treats virtue as either partisan or outdated. When moral seriousness is seen as naive or inappropriate, institutions choose what feels safest and most measurable. Without clarity on what lives require to be lived well, they cannot act with conviction. They can only manage quantified risk.

If we don’t recover these ideas, we’re left with two paths. Technocracy offers optimization without meaning. Tribalism offers identity without integrity. One sees only utility. The other sees only affiliation. Neither sees a person.

This will not remain a steady drift. Cultures that abandon moral clarity do not remain permissive. They harden into managed lives, optimized and empty—or they rupture into violent backlash, where resentment replaces vision. The longer we wait to name what’s good, the more likely we are to accept what’s efficient, or what’s angry. That’s the real urgency. Either we remember how to live well or we will be told how to live, by systems or by strongmen. Both will offer order, and nothing else.

That future is not theoretical. It is already here, in the systems poised to rank our output, and the factions poised to exclude or erase us.

V. Forgiveness and Return – The Possibility of Growth

A serious moral culture must make space for return. People fail, drift, and indulge. They harm others and themselves. Yet, they remain capable of change. A life lived badly can still turn toward something good.

We need this idea now more than ever, because many lives have slipped into habits that corrode the self and burden those around them. We don’t need to cast these people out. But we also shouldn’t pretend those paths are working. 

To put it plainly: we are not judging people based on who they are. We are looking at how they live. The behaviors that isolate, diminish, or wound appear in every group. We don’t excuse harm because someone is marginalized, or outwardly devout. That is the way of the tribalist. And we don’t condemn identity because of one person’s failure. The only honest path is to evaluate conduct. No more lazy sorting. That is the way of the technocrat. 

Forgiveness doesn’t mean approval. It means recognizing that people fall short, and believing they can choose differently. We do not accomplish this through shame or denial. Just clarity, and an open door. Repentance can’t be coerced, and growth can’t be forced. But if we want to live in a society that values personal responsibility, then we have to allow people the chance to take it.

We live in a culture that loudly praises novelty and disruption, often even when useless or corrosive, while quietly depending on the ordinary virtues. If we can’t say that some ways of living are more sustainable—more worthy of imitation—then we’ve stopped offering anything worth aspiring to.

We’ve turned “to each their own” into a moral firewall. It’s safe, tolerant, and nonjudgmental. But too often, we say it with a wince, because we know some choices corrode the chooser. The problem isn’t experimentation, or temporary drift. It’s the idea that concern is cruelty and silence is virtue. Silence is cowardice. If we care about people, we should care about the kinds of lives they build. 

VI. Visible Virtue and Cultural Repair

I don’t write this as someone who models virtue particularly well. I struggle to make the most of my time, to treat each day with the seriousness it deserves, to cultivate all of my important relationships with the attention they require. I am out of shape. I’m quick to judge, often too quick. And I frequently fall short of the standards I set for others. But I have to keep trying, and in order to try I must have something to aim toward.

So we construct it—piecemeal, from tradition, from the examples we see, from the lives that are clearly lived well. Let’s remember what we already know, and choose it again.

That’s where virtue becomes visible—not through slogans or branding, but in action. A good life is caregiving, loyalty, sacrifice, moderation. You know it when you see it. It transcends all politics and identity.

You see it in the single queer mother who never misses a PTA meeting, and advocates for everyone’s child. In the devout Muslim shopkeeper who forgives a shoplifter and feeds him anyway. In the colleague who defends someone they dislike because it’s fair.

And you see its absence—in the churchgoing father who rules his home with fear. In the traditional family man who cheats quietly and controls loudly. In the activist who wins applause while abusing those closest to them.

This is about how you live, not who you are. A virtuous life shows up, serves others, tells the truth, and carries weight. Cynicism pretends to be clarity, but it’s just cowardice in disguise. If we can’t name good lives for fear of being wrong, we’re ceding the entire moral field.

We need a culture that asks people to shape themselves, not just express themselves. One that makes moral seriousness feel like aspiration, not judgment. That elevates the whole person, not just the optimized part. That forgives failure, but still expects us to try.

We are not the first society to forget virtue. But we may be the first to do so deliberately—and call it progress. We cannot afford to oscillate between authoritarian purity and cowardly permissiveness. One suffocates the soul. The other empties it.

A better moral culture begins when we name the good, live like it matters, and demand institutions that serve it—rather than merely manage harm. That is how we begin again. And that beginning is not optional. The hollow center we’ve tolerated will not hold. If we don’t fill it with a vision of the good, others will fill it with fear, force, or fusion with the machine. The choice is not between judgment and liberation. It’s between renewal and collapse. Between small daily virtues—or something far darker.

We still have time. But not forever.