Let’s now make this concrete by going through some examples of how to ethically harmonize some Workviews and Lifeviews.

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Suppose your Lifeview that holds you should leave the planet a better place for the next generation. But your Workview holds that you can work for a giant corporation that pollutes the planet making enough to make a comfortable living for you and your family. There is clearly an incoherence in these two views that needs to get resolved. But we can resolve this in different ways. 

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You could simply revise your Lifeview, giving up your belief that you should leave the planet better for the next generation, holding on to your belief that making a comfortable living for you and your family is what matters (even if it comes at the cost of contributing to global pollution). Nothing about coherence prevents you from doing this.

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But there are better, more ethical ways of resolving this conflict and harmonizing your Workview and Lifeview not only with each other but with the world. You could hold onto your Life belief that you should leave the planet better off for the next generation while revising your Work belief that it’s okay to make a comfortable living for you in this way. There’s no one way to do this, but you could seek employment at a different, more environmentally conscious company. Or you could try to change your company’s environmental policies from within, looking to significantly lower the negative environmental impact your company produces as you make the kind of living you’re after.

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Another example of conflict to harmonize is that between a Lifeview that holds that art is the only thing truly worth pursuing and a Workview that holds you need to make enough money to support yourself.

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Here, again, you have a tension that you could resolve in different ways. You could revise your Workview and give up your belief that you need to support yourself and go all-in into your art come what may, even if it leads to starvation. But this way of resolving the clash does not point the way to a good life. It deprives you of the enjoyment of many things life has to offer. If you can’t support yourself through your work, then you also deprive yourself of future opportunities to create art. And you deprive the world of all the art you could have shared had you been able to support yourself for years or decades longer.

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A better way of harmonizing these views would be to soften your Workview. You can still hold that art is what is most worth pursuing but also that it is important and worthwhile to dedicate yourself to other work that allows you to support yourself and contribute to the world.

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A final example comes from my own life. I have a Lifeview that holds you should contribute to making people’s lives and the world as a whole significantly better. But I used to have a Workview that held that it’s important to dedicate the vast majority of your efforts to deep scholarly work that only a few specialized academics are interested in. Here was a clear conflict that I came to realize would lead me (and indeed was already leading me) to feeling miserable and dissatisfied with my work and my life. 

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I could have resolved this clash by revising my Lifeview to give up my belief that it’s important to contribute to making people’s lives significantly better. I could have held on to my Workview and taken solace in the fact that future generations of scholars could benefit from my work, even if people right now do not. 

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But this did not seem enough for me. This seemed to separate me from the world too much. I found myself having too many different interests and skills that I wanted to explore and develop that did not have to do with my scholarly work. And I decided that I was committed to the Life belief that it is important to make others’ lives significantly better. I wanted to do more, to give more. So I decided instead to revise my Workview and hold that I should dedicate a significant portion of my efforts and energy to deep scholarly work but another part to sharing the insight and wisdom I’ve gained by doing philosophy with a wider audience. This decision to integrate my Life’s Workview in this way is a crucial part of why I decided to launch the Promise of Philosophy.

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With these examples in hand, write down your own Life’s Work View that harmonizes your work and life beliefs. Build your Good Life Compass. Take action and create something that will help you navigate anything life has to offer.