I became conscious of how I wanted to live my life quite late. It was really only about 6 years ago.

Compared to others who share how they took charge of their lives, I started relatively late.

I stumbled around. With ambition. But without direction.

But now, over the past six years, I have become more and more conscious. I stopped stumbling around as much and found more purpose and alignment in the things I am doing.

I started – first implicitly, now fully consciously – asking the question of How Good Could Life Be?

Asking this question got me on a journey of creating the life that I genuinely want to live. And a life that I want to share with others.

In other words, asking this question has made my life and the lives of the people around me infinitely better.

And that’s why I am going to dive deeper into this question, to help you understand its depths, and to learn how to ask it in the context of your own life…

Before I Became Conscious…

Asking the question of How Good Could Life Be is to become conscious of the factors that determine your life.

It is the process of deciding to become one of those factors yourself.

It is the process of actively engaging with life, seeking to understand it at a deeper level, and working to grow as a human being.

But I personally started asking this question quite late (compared with the other people who share their experiences online)…

I spent my two gap years between high school and uni almost fully in idle. Living day-by-day, with everyday being more or less the same.

Getting up, eating breakfast, doing something, track and field or band practise, sleep.

This was basically the structure of my day.

You can see that my days were not empty. I actually did do stuff…

But I wasn’t really conscious of why I did these things.

Most of my hobbies were selected for me by my mom. Don’t get me wrong, I am very grateful for this. Most of the things that I ended up doing for at least half a decade – Taek Won Do, Guitar, Track & Field – I initially did not want to do. But my mom insisted that I try it out, because she knew me and she knew that I would come to love these things.

Doing these things and learning the skills associated with all of them has helped me tremendously (especially once I became conscious of how I can use these skills to shape my life).

But because I did not choose my hobbies, there was one important skill that I still had to learn: how to make choices.

You see, my mom kind of gave me the illusion of a choice. She said that I could stop whatever I had to try out at the time, once I tried it out. So to me as a kid it looked like I had the choice.

But I was mostly reacting. I enjoyed all the things I did above, so I continued doing them.

But I did not select them myself.

This meant that at some point in the two gap years between high school and university, things started to feel meaningless. I simply continued to play guitar in a band and go to track & field practise because that’s what I had been doing for years at this point.

I did enjoy doing it, but something deeper was missing…

I did not find any deeper meaning or purpose in engaging in these things.

Having something that has intrinsic value is great! But even a life filled with such activities starts feeling hollow if this life lacks an overall direction that supplies the necessary meaning…

So… what helped me overcome this problem?

My First Real Choice

Hunter S. Thompson’s quote above perfectly summarises what had happened to me…

I procrastinated in my choosing.

I was doing the things that I had always done, simply because I had always done them. Because I enjoyed doing them. This is of course better than not enjoying them. But it's inferior to doing things that you enjoy and that are aligned with a core vision or purpose for your life.

But all this changed when I started to make my first real decision…

Almost a year after finishing high school, I stopped procrastinating on the question of what I wanted to do next. I asked myself what the next big step should be.

In my case, this was whether I wanted to go to university, and if so, what I would want to study.

This turned out to be a tough choice and it took me a couple of month of serious deliberation to make.

But once I had chosen psychology, I was set and determined. I found a completely new sort of energy. And once I finally got to uni, this energy was released like a slingshot into trying to be the best possible student. And later on to live the best possible life…

What I realised was that I could actually ask the question of…

How Good Could Life Be?

Since then, this question has become one of the central mantras after which I live my life.

And as a consequence my life has gotten much better, richer, and deeper since I started asking it. And even better, the same has happened to the people around me.

This is not because I am amazing or special in any way. It' because that is what happens if you genuinely aim for the Good.

Asking this question continues to make me more conscious of the good things in life. It makes me much more aware of how much better it gets when you share these good things with others, through love...

But it’s not obvious how asking this question can make life actually better. After all, it’s not magically making me richer, healthier, or happier.

It’s a question of depth.

And this depths has to be understood if you want to start living your life asking this question.

So, let’s break it down…

How? Good. Could. Life. Be.

How?

The first step to understanding "How Good Could Life Be" is to notice that it is a question.

But why is this important?

When you ask a question and genuinely mean it – when you actually want an answer to the question you are posing – you are taking a specific way of being in the world.

You show humility. By the act of asking the question, you acknowledge that you are ignorant in some way.

This is true for any question, but it especially holds for this one.

By asking “How Good Could Life Be?”, you acknowledge that you don’t yet know. You might have some idea, some prior experience that can give you a glimpse to part of this answer. But you acknowledge that there is more to learn. You don’t assume that you already know everything that is important.

This is the first major step you need to take when you want to become the central force that shapes your life…

If you don’t phrase it as a question, you won’t be in the right state of mind to look for the answers that can help you to live a good life. You will phrase it as a statement: "I want to live a good life"! You won't look for answers. Rather, you will declare something that is supposed to happen. You will be a tyrant on yourself, expecting to live a good life based on what you already know. You won't be open about it, allowing yourself to make genuine discoveries that elevate your life to the next plane.

This is crucial, because it means that if you ask this question, you are in the right mode of being. That of the right hemisphere (McGilchrist), the mode of being (Fromm), and the realm of the sacred (Durkheim). You are in the mode that allows you to walk the narrow path of Chaos and Order on which the good life is to be found.

For sake of space, I cannot go into depth here about these modes of being. But know that by asking the question of How Good Could Life Be?, and genuinely wanting to get an answer, you are already taking some steps towards being in this mode of being.

If this is not enough for you, you can also read my other essay on The Art of Being, in which I go into more detail about how your mode of being is relevant in determining how you perceive and act in the world…

But for the context of getting a first grasp of How Good Could Life Be, you know enough. Let's move on to the next part…

Good.

When you ask “How Good Could Life Be?”, you are aiming up. You are specifically asking about a life that is Good.

But what does that mean?

Aiming for what is good is like aiming for heaven and away from hell. It is consciously choosing against misery, and for a meaningful and fulfilled life.

But this does not mean that you are asking for an easy life.

Remember that we are asking a question here. And that, if you are in the right mode of being when asking this question, you might get answers that you don’t like.

This is important to understand: Asking “How Good Could Life Be?” is not asking for a life full of hedonism, cheap pleasures, and full stomachs.

Rather, it is an investigation of what makes a truly good life. It's the dedication to acting on the answers that pop up when you ask the question.

Truly asking “How Good Could Life Be?” is to dedicate oneself to love – to let the best parts of yourself wish to bring forth the best in yourself, the people around you, and the entire world…

For the more religiously oriented: asking this question is a prayer. When it is posed genuinely and from the right mode of being, it is a question about how you can walk with God. How you can have the Tao. This is important to realise!

For now remember: Asking the question of How Good Could Life Be is a conscious exploration of what “Good” is. It is the exploration of how this Good can be invited in your life. And it is the full acceptance of the answers that come up from posing this question.

Something that will demand quite a lot from you…

Could.

When you ask the question of How Good Could Life Be, you have to manage a tight balance.

On the one hand, you have to ask it in a way that gives rise to believable answers. It’s unreasonable to expect a life without pain or negative emotion.

On the other hand, you truly have to be open to what might be possible. Is it really impossible to live a life without pain or negative emotion?

You have to be able to hold such paradoxes.

As you start asking this question, you train your mind to engage in both of these modes of being.

Right now, it might seem that this means that you are fooling yourself. That you start acting illogically. But you are not. You are acting psycho-logically (a term that I learned from Actualized.org). In your pursuit of what is true, you are not only taking the structure of objective reality into account anymore. You start to also explore the structure of your mind. You start realising how your mind shapes reality. You move from the logical to the psycho-logical.

This development takes time, but it happens when decide to become a parent to the world.

I will write about this in more detail in a future post, but for now, just read it as “taking responsibility”.

What you do when you take responsibility is that you are envisioning that something could be better and then take it on yourself to foster this betterment into being. Like a parent nurtures their kid, you nurture what you see has potential. This may be you, the people around you, or anything else in the world (including the entire world itself).

By asking the question of How Good Could Life Be and deciding to take the responsibility for the answers that come up when you ask this question, you are imposing certain constraints on yourself.

In his book ‘The Matter With Things’, Iain McGilchrist outlines three types of requirements for creativity:

1. Generative Requirements

2. Permissive Requirements

3. Translational Requirements

The first one is about generating things that creativity can act on (e.g., coming up with a number of use-cases for an object). The second one are the requirements that allow for creativity to happen (e.g., not trying to hard / being in flow). The third is the process of translating the insight that you had into something that others can observe and/or understand.

In my experience, the permissive requirement is most important when asking “How Good Could Life Be?”.

When you ask this question, it is important to let go from things that you already know and/or want. If you are asking this question properly, you need to do what is usually described as “keeping an open mind”. Don’t ask the question in the hope to get the answer you want.

Get out of the way. Ask the question. And be open for any answer.

If you don’t do that, you are not fulfilling the permissive requirement. You won’t get answers that actually help you live the good life.

But even if you manage this, the generative and translational requirements are also important.

Luckily, they are both built into this question…

Life.

The generative requirement is built into reality itself. In your case, it is your experience…

Remember that the generative requirements is the process of feeding the creative process. It is the step in which you generate the things that will be used to create something new.

The thing is, as you go through life, your experiences are the things that make you creative. You just have to pay proper attention to them…

This is not easy because the environment is so full of distractions. It is hard to just sit with your experience and derive inspiration from them. It takes training, like meditation and mindfulness practices to really get there.

I have written about how you can learn from your experiences to make your life better in ‘The Art of Being’. You can check it out if you are interested in learning more about this.

What is important to know about the Life part of the How Good Could Life Be question is that everything is connected.

This is hard to understand (and I myself am only starting to understand what that really means). But for the sake of this essay, it means that you are not isolated. You actions are not only affecting you. You actually have an impact on the world.

And this becomes clear when looking at Daniel Schmachtenberger's concept of the Third Attractor...

You can think about an attractor like a river at the base of a mountain (see the illustration above). When water falls on top of the mountain, it can either go left or right. But the end position is more or less fixed: it’s the river below.

According to Schmachtenberger, we as humanity are currently caught between two attractors. That of absolute crisis in the shape of climate crisis and the other crises that will arise from this. And that of totalitarianism, to circumvent these other crises. He calls this the Meta-Crisis.

Both outcomes are not desirable. Yet, we collectively we act as if we would like to bring these outcomes about.

So he is searching for a third attractor.

How this third attractor looks like, nobody knows.

But I believe that this attractor has to emerge from the social fabric itself. I believe that if more and more people start genuinely asking the question of How Good Could Life Be, and mean it in the broadest sense (not only in a selfish and self-serving sense), the third attractor will automatically arise.

I believe that part of the solution is to collectively transcend the incentives that shape how we act in the confines in our life. By doing so, our change in Being might just carve the third way downhill that we really need…

Be.

This brings us to the last important point of this question – that of Being.

When you seriously start asking “How Good Could Life Be?”, you cannot treat it as some sort of fantasising. You have to mean it when you ask the question.

And meaning it when you ask the question means that you are willing to take the necessary actions to align yourself with the answers that you get.

This is why starting to ask this question genuinely is not an easy thing to do. You have to actually change how you act in the world. And that is difficult and takes time & skill.

In that sense, the Being part of this question is the last requirement that we have not talked about yet: The translational requirement. It is how you translate the insights that you got into something actual. It is a change in how you show up in the world, and thereby, change the world.

This is what it is ultimately about. Without actual change in behaviour, all of this is just mental masturbation…

But in this behaviour change, you will find what you have been looking for all along…

You have heard this before. It has become a cliche at this point. But in the best sense. Because it is true.

And by starting to genuinely ask “How Good Could Life Be?” and acting on the answers that appear to you, you will learn to understand this at a deeper level.

You will realise that it’s not only about Being, but about Becoming.

You will recognise that this feeling of wanting something else, something more, will never fully go away. Your ego will always crave for more.

But as you start asking this question, and start acting on it, you will see that it is not about the part of getting something. It is about how you got there.

It is in the overcoming of difficulty. The changes that you went through. The effort that you put in.

By asking “How Good Could Life Be?”, you consciously build your own story of investigating Life itself. You will find joy, not only in attainment, but mostly in the working towards the betterment of Life itself – your life and that of the people around you…

But Why?

This is why I wanted to start writing these letters. This was part of the answer to my asking “How Good Could Life Be?”.

To get as many people as possible to seriously ask it in the context of their life, and to get them on this journey. Through this, the world will become a better place. I am not saying that this will fix all our issues. But it is the part of the solution that calls out to me...

By asking “How Good Could Life Be?”, you will realise that you are a significant part of the world. What you do matters. Because you are connected in the world. What you do affects what you are connected to. And by asking “How Good Could Life Be?” you decide to try to have this effect be a positive one.

By genuinely asking,

Genuinely receiving, and

Genuinely acting on what you find.

And you will find that this is what it is all about…

But How?

I cannot give you a clear description of how to start doing this. I can only share my own experiences and what worked for me.

But you already took the first step. You made it here. You are reading this. You are already inquiring into the world, guided by your curiosity. Continue to do this, think for yourself, integrate new ideas with your own experiences, and you will find your way.

Don’t expect it to be a 1-week/month/year/decade thing. If you really start asking this question, you will only stop when you die. So, don’t take it lightly. It will not make life easy or without pain. But it will make your life and the lives of the people around you better.

So, you are already on the journey… But what are some things that could move you forward?

• Make your first real decision: I became fully conscious when I made my first real decision with what I wanted to study. This transformed my approach to life. Have you made your first real decision already? If so, how did it change your way of engaging with the thing that you decided for? If no, what could be your first real decision?

• Be Inspired by Others: You are naturally drawn to people that inspire you. But your ability to pick up on this might be drowned out by all the noise and all the information that we are bombarded with. Learn to listen to what inspires you, and inquire why whatever inspires you does so. You will find out a lot about yourself by doing so.

• Find Someone to Grow With: I think one of the best things that happened to my quest of asking “How Good Could Life Be?” was to have people around me who did the same thing in their own ways… People who were at my level and who were and are going through the same stages as me. And people who are ahead of me, who inspire me to keep going. Don’t underestimate this.

• Read These Letters: If you want to take the question of “How Good Could Life Be?” serious, you can think about signing up to this newsletter. All I write here somehow relates to this question. I will write about the things I outlined above and more. And I will document my own breakthroughs and failures. If you think this would be of value, I would be very happy to know you are part of the journey!

• Be an Inspiration to Others: This is the final thing I can say. As you will ask this question, you will see that it’s not about what you can have, but much more about what you can give to others. This in itself is one of the core answers to the question. Start thinking about what good you could do for others and you will learn to understand what I mean by this…

You read until here, so I assume you decided to become part of this journey. Thank you! We need you!

Really!

Now Go and Do…

All the Best,
Niklas