This book was a finalist for the 2025 Colorado Book Award in General Nonfiction.
Introduction
Seeking a Good Life
“The good life is one inspired by love and guided by knowledge. Neither love without knowledge nor knowledge without love can produce a good life.”
– Bertrand Russell
How do we live a good life? It’s a question everyone will ask at some point in their lives as they navigate the triumphs, the tragedies, and the ordeals of living. For some, it may be easy to live a good life, but for many, it feels illusive, unattainable, and a struggle day after day. We deal with physical and mental health challenges, relationship issues, financial worries, work dissatisfaction, societal stress . . . The list goes on and on. Adding on the desire to be content and satisfied with our lives feels like we are asking too much of ourselves. Then we wonder, Why is a good life so hard to attain?
We all possess unique tools we believe will help guide us to a good life. We tend to adopt the paradigms of our upbringing, and they shape our relationships, our sense of self, and our behaviors in the world. Countless philosophies, religions, and economic and political ideologies try to steer our attitudes and behavior. For example, key tenets of Taoism are based around humility with a focus on the individual, simplicity, and nature.
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Christianity instructs us to follow the teachings of Jesus and the Bible to live a good life, declaring we cannot know ourselves without knowing Him. Capitalism suggests that if we work hard and accumulate wealth, we can have the freedom to elevate our status and have a better life. And nationalism promotes a good life by promoting the interests of one nation’s people above all others. The paradigms we adhere to frame our experiences and influence our decision-making in all facets of life.
However, if we look at them critically, many of these life philosophies are flawed and internally inconsistent. They run counter to our instincts, passions, and sense of logic. Instead of encouraging us to live in balance with our own nature, our philosophies may suggest, request, or demand that we either repress our nature or transcend it.
The unique American vision of the good life was shaped by its unusual founding, capitalism, and the principles of freedom and equality. The ideal American can be described as individualistic, self-reliant, pragmatic, and self-improving, as they strive to climb the ladder of success on merit and achievement. Americans believe that anyone can achieve a good life through the embodiment of these virtues. As we relentlessly strive to attain the next rung of this ladder, we are taught to trust that each step brings us closer to the supposed satisfaction of making it all on our own, the epitome of a good life. In this way, hard work and success have become a moral quality, an indication of worth as a human being. As a nation, we idolize the wealthy, the powerful, and the famous because they all supposedly sit at the top of the climb.
Since wealth is how we measure achievement, we consider the countries with the most money to be the most successful. Using gross domestic product (GDP) as the metric, America has always thrived at or near the top. But the long-term gains in American prosperity actually hide the extreme inequalities in income, wealth, and well-being distribution along racial and class lines. According to journalist Lisa Curtis, for many in the United States, “the ladder of success has been reduced to splinters.” The United States may still be ranked at the top based on GDP, but of all first-world nations, it is ranked 23rd in a new metric called the Human Development Index, which takes into account life expectancy, education, standard of living, and inequality. Using these new metrics, the American ideology doesn’t guarantee a good life either. Is there some way to find a good life that is instinctive and logical, that aligns with our passions, and that allows us to live in equilibrium with our own nature?
“On the Origin of Being”
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Suffering despite progress
According to the numbers, humans have persistently progressed over time; violence and war have declined, democracies are on the rise, gains have been made against poverty, life expectancies have expanded, and medicine is revolutionary. Many lucky Americans now have an unparalleled opportunity to live exactly how they want. You may be asking, “All of this progress supports a good life, so why don’t we have it?”
Well, in spite of all that “progress,” many aspects of our lives are deteriorating, especially our health. Over 40% of American adults are considered obese, one out of 10 Americans has type 2 diabetes, and a quarter of American deaths are due to heart disease. Why are we so unhealthy? Even though the modern world seems better than ever, many of us feel plagued by profound dissatisfaction, depression, addiction, and despair. In 2016, 56.8 million visits to American physicians were due to mental and behavioral disorders. That same year in the United States, one person took their own life every 12 minutes. In the last 20 years, there has been a 33% increase in suicide rates in America, especially among young people. Why are we so desolate? Our modern behaviors — our approach to sleep, food, work, and even the world around us — aren’t working. We need a new approach to life — or maybe an extremely old one.
So, why do we still blindly continue down the modern path? According to anthropologist Stanley Knick, it’s because “modern culture is powerful: It is mechanized, it moves mountains, it digs canals and drains swamps, it overwhelms, and it is seductive; it glitters, it tastes sweet, it goes fast. And it advertises.” We are bombarded with messages that define a good life for us, and we buy into those messages in a very literal way, by buying things to fill the emptiness and to feel fleeting happiness. We are so distracted by the bells, whistles, and excesses of modernity that we don’t realize modernity itself may be at the root of our inability to find a good life.
Eudaemonia
A good life isn’t necessarily a life of constant happiness, nor is it the absence of negative circumstances. We all enjoy prosperity and endure adversity, and every life has its ups and downs. To be human is to know that our lives will ultimately end. However, from birth to death, one fundamental element of a good life is living in a dynamic state of health.
The notion of health is more complex than simply the body’s ability to function without illness. In the mid-twentieth century, the World Health Organization (WHO) introduced the term well-being into a more innovative definition of health: “a state of complete physical, mental, and social well-being, and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity.” But health is still beyond general well-being and the lack of sickness. In the 1980s, the WHO modified this definition again to reflect a more dynamic process. Health is what allows someone to achieve goals, fulfill their needs, and cope with any situation life throws at them. It is a personal resource that is employed to maintain homeostasis, the process that biological systems use to maintain stability and equilibrium while adjusting to external forces. Being able to quickly recover when this equilibrium is disrupted is the basis for physical, mental, and social resiliency. This more active description of physical, mental, and social health encompasses far more than simply being fully functioning and without disease. When good mental and social health overlay onto good physical health, we have fulfilled one important aspect of a good life.
The other aspect of a good life is having vitality, the indefinable undercurrent of power that makes life worth enduring. We’ve all felt those ephemeral moments of connectedness and flow when our smiles and delight in our hearts are not forced or feigned. We are simply joyful because of life. Joseph Campbell, the American professor of literature famous for his observations of the human experience, said it perfectly: “I think that what we’re seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonances with our own innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive.” A good life integrates this delight of being alive into our health and well-being.
An all-encompassing idea for the combination of health, well-being, and vitality is Aristotle’s concept of eudaemonia. Many equate eudaemonia with happiness, but it’s more than that. To Aristotle, eudaemonia described the condition of human flourishing, of living a full and deeply satisfying life. According to psychologists Edward Deci and Michael Ryan, eudaemonia “maintains that well-being is not so much an outcome or end state as it is a process of fulfilling or realizing one’s daimon or true nature—that is, of fulfilling one’s virtuous potentials and living as one was inherently intended to live.”
There is nothing more “inherently intended” than how the natural process of evolution shaped us to adapt to our environment, survive, and ultimately reproduce. By delving into a study of our collective evolutionary origins and life histories, we can begin to grasp that, unlike other philosophies and ideologies, evolution wrought us to live within our natures. Evidence from many scientific fields—anthropology, archaeology, biology, genetics, psychology, primatology, and medicine—support the idea that evolution encoded within us a road map to help us find eudaemonia. All we need is to learn to read the signs.
Thankfully, a shift is already happening. Lisa Curtis sees people transitioning “from climbing the ladder of unfulfilled societal expectations and consumerism to blazing a trail with a life guided by a holistic focus on well-being, community, and sustainability.” Deep down, this shift feels right, almost natural. It’s as if some forgotten part of us is beginning to surface and let its voice be heard. Do any of our old visions of the good life help us listen to this voice? Can they help us redefine a good life for ourselves and forge a new path, or is our blind adherence to them what got us here in the first place? It’s clear that our modern dilemma requires a different approach.
Instead of being mindlessly compelled by modernity, instead of reevaluating and reframing old practices, and instead of constructing a path based on personal experiences, let’s focus through the lens of science. Science verifies that we literally evolved to thrive in this world, and the key to a good life is simply living the way we evolved to live.
Our physical and mental health suffer because our world is unrecognizable from the one humans inhabited for most of our existence, the one we evolved in. We thrived in close-knit groups but now live alone in cities of millions. We survived, even prospered, through scarcity but now have unbelievable excess. We slept when we were tired and ate when we were hungry but now follow artificial and rigid approaches to both. Compared with most of human history, modernity seems empty. Journalist Andrew Sullivan sums it up nicely: “As we have slowly and surely attained more progress, we have lost something that undergirds all of it: meaning, cohesion, and a different, deeper kind of happiness than the satisfaction of all our earthly needs.”
If we ground our approach to life in Darwin’s theory of evolution (figure 0.1), change our behaviors to better match our evolved natures, and trust that nature provided us with the tools we need to be successful, we will be well on our way to achieving eudaemonia. Our evolutionary journey has already created a good life within us. All we must do is rediscover it.
Jenny Powers is the co-author of the award-winning “On the Origin of Being: Understanding the Science of Evolution to Enhance Your Quality of Life.” She is a Colorado mom, a writer of fiction and non-fiction, a scientist trained at the University of Colorado and National Jewish Health, and a former CU women’s basketball player.
Luke Comer is a writer, director, and entrepreneur from Boulder, working in multiple genres. He considers himself a concept artist and systems scientist. In addition to “On the Origin of Being,” his other projects include the book “The Systems of Nourishment.”
