Philosophy and Life Design: Next Level Ethical Wayfinding and How to Build a Life that Really Works For You with Good Life Journaling
Do you sometimes wish that you could get more evidence about which ways of living are actually good for you? Do you wish you could get concrete data and information on what is good for you that can help you be not just philosophical but also genuinely scientific in your pursuit of the good life? Well, in this post, I share wish you a unique journaling practice that you can use to do exactly this!
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Last post, I shared with you how you can build a Good Life Compass. This is a powerful tool you can use to wayfind ethically through life. You can use it to see whether you’re on track in the direction of your own vision of the good life, even if you don’t know exactly what you want out of life.
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In this post, I show you how you can take your Ethical Wayfinding to the next level by engaging in a practice that I call Good Life Journaling. In particular, I’m going to show you how you can actually use your Good Life Compass and some other measurements to gather data. Data that can help you empirically determine which ways of pursuing your vision of the good life really work for you.
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The Good Life Journaling Practice is inspired by Burnett and Evan’s Good Time Journaling but it takes a more explicitly ethical approach.
There are two main elements to a Good Life Journal:
1. Good Life Gauges ( Engagement, Energy, and Harmonization)
2. Reflection Space
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The basic idea is that for you to use (1) these gauges to measure how different ways of spending your time contribute to your vision of the good life and (2) this space to reflect on how and why they contribute or not to your vision.
Let me break each of these components down.
First, we have the Good Life Gauges. Each of these keeps track of a dimension that is crucial for our being able to live your own vision of the good life.
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Engagement Gauge:
The first Good Life Gauge measures Engagement because engagement is a key kind of clue for wayfinding your way to your own version of a truly good life. When an activity engages you, you feel alive while you are doing it. You are excited while performing it! Engagement in an activity means focus. It means that you have a good time while you perform it.
When you learn what activities reliably engage you, you’re discovering what kind of work works for you as you do it.
This Gauge measures your level of engagement during the activity. It goes from Low to High Engagement (if you want to assign numbers, you can think of it as ranging from 0 to 10)
At the lower end of the scale, you have the activities that you find incredibly boring. The ones that you feel you have to suffer through every second. An example might be doing your taxes or sitting through a budget meeting.
At the upper end of the scale, you have the activities that you find fun, that you can easily get into and keep at. An example of this might be having a conversation with your best friends or playing your favorite game.
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Flow Checkbox:
When your engagement in an activity reaches its peak, something special happens. You enter a special state, a so-called a Flow State or Experience.
Flow Experiences (studied extenseively in the work of psychologist Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi) consists of:
-Feeling Completely Immersed or Losing One’s Self in the Activity
-Feeling a Sense of Euphoria or Ecstasy
-Feeling Great Inner Clarity about What to Do and How to Do It
-Feeling Totally Calm and At Peace
-Feeling a Loss of Time Ensue
As Burnett and Evans put it, Flow is “the ultimate state of personal engagement.” That is why the Engagement Gauge features a Flow checkbox. It is a way for you to keep track of what ways of spending your time lead to these flow experiences. These experiences are especially important to capture and gather information about. That's why the Engagement Gauge has a Flow Checkbox for you to keep track of which activities lead you to have flow experiences.
A truly rewarding and satisfying career is one that contains a lot of flow experiences. More generally, flow experiences are something that we should strive to make a regular part of as many aspects of our life as we can in order to build and live a truly good and well-designed life.
Armed with this view of the role engagement plays in the good life, we can turn to our next Good Life Gauge: Energy
Energy Gauge:
The second Good Life Gauge measures Energy. Energy, like engagement, is a key kind of clue for wayfinding your way to your own version of a truly good life. When an activity energizes you, it literally gives you fuel to continue pursuing your vision of the good life.
When you learn to keep track of how your energy levels change and flow as you perform different activities, you can start rearranging your activities to maximize your vitality and get more out of your current life!
This Gauge measures your level of psychological energy after the activity (once you’re done with it!). It has positive and negative values because there are activities that drain your energy as well as activities that fuel your energy (if you want to assign numbers, you can think of it as ranging from -5 to +5).
At the lower end of the scale, you have the activities that leave you exhausted when you are done with them. The ones that suck the life right out of you and require you to rest and recuperate after them. This could be things like arguing with a family member about politics or having to grade student papers.
At the upper end of the scale, you have the activities that inspire you unlike any other. The ones that make you feel alive and ready to take on whatever comes your way. This could be things like spending time with your best friend, listening to your favorite playlist, or working on your passion projects.
Life will always have some activities that will be draining. But if most of what you spend your days on drains you, then it’ going to be very hard to keep your pursuit of the good life going. That’s why you should be on the lookout of ways of pursuing your own vision of the good life that energize you. These are the ways of pursuing the good life that can keep you going forward!
Living out a good life requires that you have the energy to actually keep living it. And this requires figuring out what increases, what sustains, and what decreases your energy. And managing these appropriately. To build a truly good life, you must use the Energy Gauge to record and manage your energy levels.
Armed with this view of the role engagement and energy play in the good life, we can turn to the last but also the most important Good Life Gauge, which measures Ethical Harmonization:
Harmonization Gauge:
The third Good Life Gauge measures Harmonization with your Good Life Compass. It is a measure of whether your activities conform with your considered core values and highest principles. It is this gauge that makes your Journal go beyond a mere Good Time Journal that can help you figure out which activities lead you to have a good time. It is this gauge that makes your Journal a genuine Good Life Journal that can help you figure out which ways of spending your time lead to your living out your own vision of the good life.
Like the Energy Gauge, the Harmonization Gauge has both positive and negative values because there are activities that constitute you’re failing to conform and living against your Good Life Compass as well as activities that constitute your living up to and according to your Good Life Compass (if you want to assign numbers, you can think of it as ranging from -5 to +5).
At the lower end of the scale, you have the activities that constitute really harmful/vicious ways of spending your time/living. Examples include getting into heated pointless discussions with trolls on the internet or spending hours surfing through social media feeling unsatisfied with your life without doing anything to change it.
At the upper end of the scale, you have the activities that constitute really beneficial/virtuous ways of spending your time/living. Examples include helping others by exercising your strengths or developing yourself in a way that you find personally fulfilling and edifying.
This third Good Life Gauge is absolutely crucial to keep track of as you go through life because to the extent that you are spending your time in ways that score negatively on harmonization, you are failing to live up to your own vision of the good life. You are moving backward in terms of your progress toward a good life! This is so, even if you find yourself engaged and energized by the activities. For example, you may find yourself engaged and energized by playing a single-player game on your phone for days on end. But if your Good Life Compass holds that you should spend considerable time in meaningful activities with others or contributing to something greater than yourself, then this activity is making you feel alive without actually making you live well!
Armed with a view of how these three Good Life Gauges keep track of variables that are crucial to living a good life, I turn to discuss the second element of the Good Life Journal: the Reflection Space.
Reflection Space:
The second element of a Good Life Journal consists of space for you to write down observations concerning what is moving the needle in your Good Life Gauges. This is where you write down any insights you might have, any patterns that you might notice. Really, anything that helps you figure out how to live even better.
The goal here is to get as clear as possible on what is and is not working for you. The clearer you are, the greater the self-awareness that you develop, and the better you can set your wayfinding direction toward a good life.
So, for example, if you were really engaged at a meeting when you summarized someone’s proposal in a way that made everyone enthusiastically agree, where you engaged by skillfully restating a point, by helping someone be understood, or by bringing unity and consensus? Maybe it was all of the above.
If you conclude that the skillful restatement is what really moves the engagement needle, this important insight can help you look for more opportunities for creative discussion and content creation.
If you conclude that helping someone be understood moves the needle, then this insight can help you look for more opportunities for discussion leading and facilitating.
If you conclude that bringing unity to a group is what moves it, this can help you look for more opportunities to bring people together and facilitate bonding.
If you conclude that all three aspects make significant contributions to your engagement in this case, then you can look for more opportunities to lead and engage creative discussions among groups with a common purpose.
What the right next steps are depends on what speaks to you. So take the time. Reflect. Find what speaks to you. Listen to it. Use this to move forward.
Now that we’ve gone over the basic elements of a Good Life Journal, I turn to share with you how to use it in order to start improving your own life in a philosophical AND scientific way.
Good Life Journaling
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I recommend that you begin Good Life Journaling by filling out gauges and reflections for at least three to four weeks. The important thing is to take a long enough period of time to capture all the various kinds of activities that arise in your current situation. Three weeks is good because there are some activities that may only come around every few weeks. Once you do so, you will have gathered enough data to see patterns and trends emerge.
When you reach this point, you should look out for activities where the positive and negative values of your different gauges come apart:
-Activities that Engage but Don’t Energize you
These are ways of spending your time that are dangerous because you get sucked into them and then they suck the life out of you. Activities in this category can include getting into arguments with certain people or getting drunk to the point of being extremely hungover. These are activities that you should avoid being tempted into to the extent that you can.
-Activities that Energize you but Don’t Engage you
These are ways of spending your time that you can think of as “trading fun for energy,” something that is like a “fun cost” you put up with in order to gain more energy. Activities in this category can include working out, meditating, or resting with your eyes closed for a little while. These are activities that you should engage in consciously, in a way that works for you and the way you live out your days.
- Activities that Score Low on Harmonization AND Engagement/Energy
These are ways of spending your time that are Time Thieves. They are activities that take you away from where you need to be heading in life and do so in a way that is costly. They suck away your time and therefore your life to the extent that you engage in them. You do yourself a disservice by continuing to engage in them. Activities in this category can include spending time with a particularly pessimistic person who drains you or going to boring and pointless meetings.
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- Activities that Score High on Engagement But Low on Harmonization AND Energy
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These are ways of spending your time that are Dream Killers. These are the worst kind of activities you can engage in. Because they are high engagement, they tempt you and suck you in. But once you are in them, they will drain the life out of you. And leave you worse than you were before. These are activities that kill your dreams by getting you to focus on precisely the wrong things, spending your time and energy in ways that take you away from your own vision of the good life.You do yourself an even greater disservice by continuing to engage in them than you do by continuing to engage in Time Thieves. Activities in this category can include fighting with a toxic person that gets under your skin or procrastinating by binge-watching a show that captivates your attention you but does not fulfill you.
Do Yourself a Service and straight-up Decide to Cut Time Thieves and Dream Killers out of your life to the extent that you can. Add them to a Not-To-Do List of things that are harmful or problematic activities that you are committed no longer to engage in. And stop engaging in them.
As you gather data using your Good Life Journal, you should, of course, also be on the lookout for:
- Activities that Score High on All Three Gauges
These are the kinds of activities that really move the needle in moving you towards your realizing your goals and living your dreams. A well-designed, truly good life is filled with activities of this sort. For me, an example of an activity in this category is working on crafting blog posts and tools the Promise of Philosophy. When I do this, I am actively pursuing my own vision of the good life by creating and sharing empowering philosophical mindsets and tools with others in a way that I find incredibly exciting and energizing and that regularly leads me to enter into a flow state as I work on them!
When you find activities like these, you should take care to record them and give them an important role in your regular life. To the extent that you can, you should take care to turn these activities into ABSOLUTE MUSTS that you get done every day or at least every week. For they are activities that propel you forward toward your own vision of the good life!
As you gather more and more data using your Good Life Journal, you can proceed to start tuning up your life, to rearrange it so you get the most out of the activities that you are currently performing. So that your life works better for you! In doing this, keep in mind the following general guidelines:
-It is best to surround less engaging activities with more engaging activities. That way you don’t dread doing them or lose momentum before or after them.
-It is good to give yourself small rewards when you complete energy-draining tasks to reenergize you afterward. That way you make sure you have the energy for what comes after.
-It is also good to make sure that you are well-rested and have the energy reserves needed to do these tasks right. That way you do them in a way that does not lead to wasting time on them, or worse, doing them again.
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As you keep Good Life Journaling and using the information you gather to build a better life, remember that in a truly well-designed good life, the bulk of your activities should score highly on all three dimensions. As you move forward and make changes in your life for the better, you owe it to yourself to aim for this kind of life.
Don’t get me wrong, there will always be weeds in the garden of your life. No matter how well you design your life, you’ll have to do some things you don’t enjoy at some point. As Burnett and Evans put it, “There are parts of any job or any career that are hard an annoying—but if most of what yo do at work is not bringing you alive, then it’s killing you”
All too often, we internalize the limiting, oppressive belief that work is not supposed to be enjoyable. That it’s something you have to suffer through. This is far from true, though! In a well-designed and well-lived life, you are able to find work of the right kind, the kind that you enjoy, that you feel you get to do because it lights you up.
To the extent that you can fill your time with activities that contribute to your own vision of the good life while energizing and engaging you, you are living a well-designed life that will skyrocket you toward your own vision of the good life!
Limiting/Oppressive Belief: Work is supposed to be hard, not enjoyable. It’s something you have to get through. Something you put up with.
Philosophical Reframing: Work of the right kind is supposed to be enjoyable. It’s something you get to do. Something that lights you up.
Conclusion
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In this post, I have shared with you a powerful practice that you can use to take your Ethical Wayfinding to the Next Level and continuously move forward toward your own vision of the good life. I shared with you how you can use a Good Life Journal to bring a scientific approach to your wayfinding by gathering data about what ways of spending your time really further the pursuit of your own vision of the good life and which ones do not.
To aid you in your Ethical Wayfinding, I have created a Guide to Good Life Journaling that includes Worksheets with Good Life Gauges and Reflection Space for you to print out and fill out for yourself!
Simply Click and Subscribe to get it!
When you click and sign up, you will also receive as a Bonus a Guide to Building and Recalibrating Your Good Life Compass so that you can make sure your Good Life Compass (and so your Harmonization Gauge) is calibrated to your own actual Vision of the Good Life.
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Sign up, and you will also get the Flourishing Grasp Method, an exclusive 5-Step Method I've developed to help you Bounce Back Quickly When Life Brings You Down. Just Click Below and Sign Up to Access it!
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Don’t let the Philosophy Remain Mere Words. Take Action. Use it to Actively Shape your Life for the Better. Use it to Build a Truly Good and Well-Designed Life. Use it to Build the Life of your Dreams.