The recent Air India crash was so shocking. It was an utterly tragic event that came out of nowhere and killed all 270 people on board (and some on the ground) – bar one. I felt heartbroken for those that lost their lives and for their families and friends. I also couldn’t stop thinking about that one person who walked out of the wreckage alive. Can you imagine? It really got me thinking about what does it mean to live a good life.
A seat 11A existence
Can you imagine being that person? Can you imagine being the only person to survive a plane crash in which everyone else (including your brother) loses their life? The person in question was in Seat 11A – to all intents and purposes the miracle seat.
My mind kept going back to that man and wondering how he must be feeling. Still now – weeks later – I think about him. Is he feeling traumatised by guilt? Is he seeing his life through new eyes? Is he feeling blessed, like some kind of ‘chosen one’? Is he feeling pressure to live life differently? How has the experience changed his relationship with life and what he considers to be a good life? Could it be that he now thinks of life itself as being the miracle? Or life itself being the definition of a good life, because it is the one, the only one that he still has despite everything, and despite 270 others no longer having theirs?
The trap of the performative approach to life
When I did my year-long training to become a professionally certified integral development coach, I remember vividly the session where we were introduced to the concept of vertical human development (enshrined in the integral approach). The trainer was explaining the model of horizontal development and its shortcomings. They drew on the whiteboard a picture of a stick person rowing in a little rowing boat towards an island. They wrote a title above the picture which read: “The Island Where It All Works Out”.
They talked about how so many of us live our lives working towards that next moment when either we get that promotion or job, or we find the love of our lives, or we succeed in writing that book or buying that house or earning x amount of money. They talked about how we not only delay living in some ways but also delay our own access to a sense of contentment or personal adequacy, until we have reached that ‘island’.
And then of course, we arrive at the island – we achieve the promotion, get married, write the book, earn the money etc – only to discover that there is yet another island that’s come into view that looks even more alluring and exciting to reach. So we postpone life again and our sense of contentment and personal adequacy as we set off in search of that new destination. And on it goes.
Before we know it, we’ve spent decades of our life – perhaps even the whole of our adult life – rowing towards the island where it will all work out, only to discover that we never quite arrive and that the sense of ‘enoughness’ still eludes us.
This is one aspect of Oliver Burkeman’s work and his exploration of what it means to be happy and to live a good life. As he put it in his appearance on the High Performance podcast in 2024:
“We put off life until we get it all done”.
In his books The Antidote and Four Thousand Weeks, he explores the human tendency to try to do everything, to pack in as much as possible before allowing ourselves to turn our attention to what we really want, or what is really important or desirable to us. To me this is a version of rowing towards the island where it all works out: it is rowing towards the island where it all gets done and we find the time and space to do what we really want to do.
The result is the same: enduring dissatisfaction, restlessness and frustration. Because the task list never ends. We never reach the point where we feel enough. And so we never really feel a sense of being OK with ourselves or our lives, nor ever turn our attention towards the stuff that really matters to us, or even perhaps understand what that is.
Lessons from Elite Sport
I love watching most big sports events – like the World Cup, the Olympics and most recently, Wimbledon. I’ve been struck more and more in recent years of the increasing emphasis placed by top athletes on the importance of wellbeing, not just performance, and the narrative that is emerging from them about personal happiness being about more than winning.
British Olympic gold medallist swimmer Adam Peaty, who struggled a lot with his mental health in the period after his first gold medal winning Olympics said:
“I spent most of my life kind of validating, getting my gratification or life’s fulfilment from my results and that led me to some dark moments.”
The Russian tennis player Andrey Rublev has also struggled a lot as a result of measuring his sense of self-worth according to his performance. He is reported to have said:
“If you feel some problems with yourself, it will affect everything. Sooner or later you will have problems with your family, with work, with everything…..but if you’re happy with yourself, the difficult moments won’t affect you as much.”
And this year at Wimbledon, I was amazed to hear Carlos Alcaraz, when reflecting after his loss in the final, make a distinction between losing vs failing, and also Jannik Sinner thanking his team for “having made me a better tennis player but more importantly a better person”.
Even in the world of elite sport, there is a recognition that performance is not everything and that measuring your self-worth according to your performance is only ever going to be a pathway to emotional struggle and unhappiness. Who you are and your relationship with yourself are, it seems, increasingly recognised as a more reliable pathway to living a good life, than performance, ‘success’ or busyness.
So what does it mean to live a good life?
So if performance is not the pathway to living a good or happy life, what is? The story of the Air India survivor brings me back to the conclusion that we often overlook the very essence of what a good life is – and that is the very fact of being alive.
What if the definition of living a good life is simply the experience of living of it? Perhaps also the ability to appreciate the miracle that is our existence, our little transitory existence, of a length unspecified and unknown to us or to anyone, until after the fact?
What if – dear reader – you are already living a Seat 11A life? What if you’ve already pulled the Ace card, won the jackpot – simply by virtue of the fact that you are here, exactly as you are?
What if you being here, doing what you’re doing, living life the exact way you’re living it, at this very time, is an absolute fricking miracle? When you think about all the ways in which that egg might not have been fertilised, and all the other ways since then that you might not have made it through to this point (as so many millions of people have not) – then it really is a miracle that you are here.
Last year I was deeply moved by reading the articles written by Simon Boas who was diagnosed with terminal throat cancer in his 40s. He had without doubt lived an extraordinary life but he also had an extraordinary attitude to living. As he put it:
“… the thought I keep coming back to is how lucky it is to have lived at all. To exist is to have won the lottery. In fact, there are so many bits of extraordinarily-unlikely good luck that have occurred just for us to be born, that it’s like hitting the jackpot every day of the year.”
I strongly recommend reading the whole article that you can find here or his book that was published shortly after his death called ‘A Beginner’s Guide to Dying in which he urged us to:
“..enjoy the tiny ways you can make other people a little happier. That’s actually the secret of being happy oneself”.
So if you were to follow Simon’s advice and see your existence through these eyes, what it might it mean for how you lived life and how you defined a good life? What might that make possible for you?
Would it change anything about your attitude towards this new beginning youre dreaming of? Would it make it more or less important? More or less urgent? More or less of a priority to move ahead?
People come to me with all sorts of dreams or wishes for their lives: new jobs or careers, new relationships, new adventures, a creative project, a fundamentally new way of living that is more aligned with who they are. You can read some of their testimonials here after working with me. You can also download my Life Thriveometer worksheet here and give some serious thought to how ‘good ‘ a life you are living.
Our search for what it means to live a good life is often caught up in a search for the wrong things. My purpose in this work is to help you find what really matters to you and to move towards that. There might be some deep soul searching to do and some tough questions to grapple with. But honestly, it’s so damn worth it.
If you’d like to start the journey, book a call with me here.