A good life requires so many different elements, but mostly comes down to one thing: what you put into it, esp. in regards to improving the lives and welfare of others around you. Do this, and you will find that your own life gets better and better. Be kind, do work to help others, care about people and their lives (and not just your own) and you'll find that life will turn out pretty darn fine.
But lack of things and capital will never get you a good life. If you are starving, no matter what you put in or how kind you are to others, you cannot have a good life. If you are home insecure, you cannot have a good life. Period.
I'm going to define "good life" to mean food, housing, and health security.
While you're right that nothing is guaranteed, the wealthier you are, the more you can guarantee these basic needs.
Even me, being in tech making around 6 figures, I haven't achieved my definition of a good life. This is because if I lose my job, the basic needs I listed cannot be maintained.
However, if you do not need to work (i.e. CEOs, billionaires, etc.), you are more likely to have your basic needs for a good life met for the rest of your life even if you lose your "job".
What I'm trying to say is that having things and lots of capital can very much get you to my aforementioned definition of a "good life".
I think we're getting ahead of ourselves with these philosophical questions of what a "good life" is. First, let's meet everyone's basic needs: food, housing, and health. Because those needs are clearly not met.
Is anyone in the USA actually starving? That's a common thing brought up, but calories are so cheap in the US that most poor people are actually morbidly obese, not starving. Even if you were starving, you could easily subsist panhandling at some traffic intersection. How long does it take to panhandle $10? An hour or two? And with that you could buy a 15 pound bag of rice which is like a months' worth of carbs.
Yes, absolutely. The idea that nobody should starve because they can stroll up to an intersection and fill their pockets is based on a lot of assumptions that are simply untrue.
The US is huge, some people would have to hitchhike quite far to get to a high-traffic area. There's also no guarantee of receiving any handouts at all, so I'm not sure I'd use the word "easily" (or even "possible"). And after hitchhiking and begging all day, praying for a few bucks to buy rice, you're not actually going to want to buy rice. You're going to want alcohol, or something fatty and sugary, or just plain drugs.
Your framing of this problem trivializes a terrible, dehumanizing experience, and is out of touch with the reality of the impoverished middle-American.
- refrigeration or other means of preserving the prepared food
- a secure place to store your month's food supply from other hungry people and/or cleaners
- mental health while you eat the same plain rice with bare your hands for a month and society judges you for "not pulling yourself up by your bootstraps."
There's a big difference between "starvation" and "hunger"/"food insecurity".
You can make all the excuses you want, but nobody is dying of starvation in the USA. The number of annual starvation deaths in the US is so small we don't even track it, and the people that do die of starvation aren't starving because they are poor, but sick (i.e. cancer makes them stop eating).
I'm not advocating a plain rice diet 24/7. I'm just saying calories are so cheap in America that obesity is a bigger problem for the poor than starvation.
Furthermore, even the poorest in the US have access to the things in your list if they want them.
This is one of the most underrated questions, despite how often it is asked, and it's a shame how many truly flip answers it gets whenever someone asks it.
Wealthier parents will buy homes there and donate/invest in local schools, which will afford a better education to their kids that, along with better networking, will increase the chances of being financially successful of their kids.
I think that's a terrible answer, sorry, and is pretty much what I mean. I somewhat agree with Taleb that wealth begets education, not the other way around. The special thing about good school districts is not the schools themselves, and the special thing about schools is not necessarily their budget: Some of the worst performing schools have the highest budgets.
It's not. Conscientious is a very specific set of behaviours.
I was offering an easy answer to the confused wondering of the Atlantic article. The path to success is known. Apparently not as well known as I would have thought. No need to point to the fact that the heterogeneous mess of a "College Degree" as being not a factor.
Yes, there's lots of ways to not succeed. Why not do a very little bit of shallow research and shout out to the roof tops what actually does work?!
A good life requires so many different elements, but mostly comes down to one thing: what you put into it, esp. in regards to improving the lives and welfare of others around you. Do this, and you will find that your own life gets better and better. Be kind, do work to help others, care about people and their lives (and not just your own) and you'll find that life will turn out pretty darn fine.