The good-enough life: How to live before the curtain falls by Manfred F. R. Kets de Vries

‘Pure, distilled and spectacularly beautiful wisdom’: Only Manfred Kets de Vries could have written this – such deep, difficult but important ideas written in an elegantly simple, poetry-like, beautiful language. This is the work of a great master, scholar, practitioner and an academician who has internalized and also produced decades' worth of scholarship from a wide range of fields, from Philosophy, Psychology and Leadership, and a wise, deeply caring human being who has lived a very reflective and rich life.

THE GOOD ENOUGH LIFE 

Human beings have spent several thousand years trying to define the good life, with

results that would embarrass any other field of inquiry. We have mapped the genome,

split the atom, landed on the moon, and built refrigerators sophisticated enough to inform

us, unprompted, that we are low on milk. Yet we remain touchingly unable to agree on

what to do with the four thousand weeks we are allotted before the refrigerator outlives

us.

The philosophers have not helped as much as their reputations suggest. Aristotle

recommended eudaimonia, referring to a flourishing life, without specifying what one does

on a rainy Tuesday afternoon when flourishing feels quite theoretical. Epicurus

recommended modest pleasures, advice largely ignored by everyone who has ever

owned a motor boat. The Stoics urged us to distinguish what we can control from what

we cannot, a distinction that collapses the moment a teenager is involved. The Austrian

psychiatrist Frankl placed meaning at the center of existence. Sigmund Freud,

characteristically less festive, proposed that psychoanalysis might convert neurotic

misery into ordinary unhappiness, a modest offer, and one of the more honest claims in

the literature.

The first mistake we make about the good life is assuming it must be a happy one.

Happiness, however, behaves like an unreliable employee: it arrives late, leaves early,

and vanishes the instant we ask whether it is still on the premises. It is like a butterfly

dancing from flower to flower. The person who wakes each morning to interrogate his

own mood — am I happy yet? — has constructed before breakfast an almost perfect

obstacle to happiness. I have watched clients conduct this interrogation with the rigor of

a compliance audit, and the results are exactly what one would expect from applying

quarterly metrics to an emotion.

Modern psychologists often distinguish hedonic well-being, the pursuit of pleasure, from

eudaimonic well-being, a conceptualization rooted in Aristotle’s account of human

flourishing, the latter referring to the harder question of whether life feels worthwhile. A

life devoted entirely to duty soon becomes joyless; a life devoted entirely to pleasure

becomes curiously empty, as many lottery winners and heirs discover when they learn

that money can purchase almost anything except a self.

The good life, then, concerns something beneath one’s mood: meaning, relationship,

agency, contribution, curiosity, some negotiated peace with oneself, a way of inhabiting

one’s own existence, the way a tenant inhabits a flat he intends to renovate later,

indefinitely.

And here is where psychoanalysis earns its keep, because the greatest obstacle to living

well is rarely the hostility of the world. It is our magnificent, tireless capacity to

misrepresent, to ourselves, what we actually want.

The problem of wanting

Modern civilization has produced an elegant answer to the ancient question of the good

life: more. More money, more houses, more followers, more longevity, more visibility.

Consumer society’s signature achievement has been converting enough into something

resembling a diagnosis.

Consider a man I will call Viktor, a chief executive of considerable talent and even more

considerable appetite, whom I once coached through what his board delicately termed a

“period of reflection” and what his wife more accurately termed a mid-life catastrophe with

a corporate expense account. Viktor owned one large villa and coveted a second. Upon

acquiring the second one, he began investigating islands. Having secured one, he

discovered, through the intelligence networks the very rich maintain about one another’s

runways, that a rival possessed a larger island with a superior landing strip. Paradise, for

Viktor, had become an irritant.

The tragedy is that desire has no factory-installed stopping mechanism. The irony is that

we keep expecting the next acquisition to install one retroactively. Psychologists call this

hedonic adaptation: What delighted us yesterday soon becomes part of the scenery, while

our expectations quietly rise to erase the difference.

Psychoanalysis adds a less comfortable question: whose desire is this? Many of the

things we want with such ferocity were never entirely ours. We may be trying to impress

a father three decades in the ground or reassure a frightened child who once knew real

scarcity or pursue admiration because some interior courtroom has already returned a

verdict of being fundamentally unlovable. The adult tells himself he is pursuing

excellence. The child inside him is simply shouting look at me, and the child does not

retire on schedule.

This is why achievement can become compulsive. Ambition itself is not the problem; it

can be creative and life-enhancing. The problem begins when we conscript achievement

into psychological combat it was never equipped to win. No promotion repairs a childhood

humiliation. No bank balance guarantees love. No title suspends mortality. Yet we keep

sending these accomplishments into battle against internal wounds, and they keep losing,

and we keep drafting reinforcements.

The invisible theatre

Every human being lives simultaneously in two kinds of theatre productions: the external

play of jobs, marriages and quarterly results, and an internal theatre whose cast includes

parents, other family members, rivals, former lovers and assorted villains, several dead

for decades and nonetheless maintaining excellent attendance. We enter every new

situation with this company in tow: a demanding boss becomes the critical father, a distant

spouse the unavailable mother, a talented colleague the sibling who received all the

attention at Christmas.

We then wonder, with genuine bewilderment, why we are so furious about something so

trivial. The answer is that the argument is rarely about the argument. Freud called this

pattern repetition compulsion: we recreate variations of unfinished emotional dramas,

hoping unconsciously for a different ending, and receiving, with metronomic reliability, the

same one. The abandoned person selects unavailable partners with the precision of a

sommelier. The humiliated child becomes the humiliating executive, appalled to discover,

one leadership program later, that she has become her own antagonist. The neglected

child grows into the indispensable adult who cannot say no, having concluded long ago

that being needed was the only reliable form of being wanted. We call this destiny. It is,

more often a kind of choreography that’s rehearsed so long we have forgotten we are

dancing. Clearly, a good life requires psychological archaeology: sifting which parts of our

lives represent genuine choice and which are old scripts in new costumes.

Becoming the author of one’s own life

Perhaps the good life begins when we become the authors of our lives rather than actors

reciting lines handed down by ghosts. Self-determination theory names autonomy,

competence and relatedness as basic needs. Psychoanalysis adds something less tidy:

inner freedom, meaning not freedom from obligations, and certainly not the adolescent

fantasies of doing precisely as one pleases, a fantasy several senior executives never

relinquish, merely relocate to the corner office. It means recognizing the forces operating

inside us without automatically obeying them.

I can feel envy without reorganizing my calendar around it, rage without detonating the

relationship, a fear of abandonment without clinging, limpet-like, to people who should,

on balance, be permitted to leave. I can acknowledge that my parents damaged me in

specific ways without appointing them permanent directors of my emotional life, a board

seat they did not earn and cannot legally be removed from, only quietly outvoted.

Maturity is not the disappearance of our neuroses; such a retirement never arrives. It is

becoming acquainted with them, knowing where they live, and revoking their keys to the

house, even as they continue to ring the doorbell at inconvenient hours. This requires

tolerating ambivalence: accepting that the same person can be loving and infuriating,

admirable and disappointing.

Psychological immaturity, however, divides the world into saints and villains, a filing

system with the great advantage of never requiring revision. Maturity insists on the

inconvenient conjunction and: I love you and sometimes I cannot stand you; my parents

loved me and damaged me. The good life requires us to grow large enough to hold these

contradictions without breaking.

This becomes especially difficult when our sense of worth depends on remaining

admirable, exceptional or beyond reproach. Ambivalence then feels less like complexity

than injury, and other people become mirrors whose principal duty is to return a flattering

image.

The narcissistic trap

Of course, some degree of narcissism is structurally necessary. Without it, nobody would

get out of bed, fall in love or start a company. Constructive narcissism says: I have value.

Destructive narcissism says: I have value only if everyone else keeps noticing, preferably

in writing, preferably today.

Narcissistically organized people appear preoccupied with themselves but are,

paradoxically, ferociously dependent on others; they need an audience the way the rest

of us need oxygen, and without applause the internal scaffolding begins, audibly, to creak.

I once worked with a chairman whose office contained, tastefully arranged, framed

photographs documenting every occasion on which he had stood within three meters of

someone more famous than himself, a life curated for witnesses, assembled by a man

who could not, once the office emptied each evening, entirely locate himself without them.

Moreover, modern technology has industrialized this vulnerability. We once compared

ourselves mainly with neighbors and colleagues, quite a manageable set. Now, before

breakfast, we may compare ourselves with several billion people, a sample size no self-esteem

was designed to withstand.

Social media has bestowed on humanity a gift previous generations lacked: a pocket-sized

envy-generation device called a mobile phone, always charged, always available.

And yet envy contains information, if we can bear to read it. It tells us something true

about our wishes, though the mistake lies in taking its instructions literally. The

photograph is not the life. There is always something outside the frame, and it is usually

most of the story.

Love without possession

No honest account of the good life avoids love, although humanity has made heroic efforts

to complicate the subject beyond recognition. We speak of “having” a spouse, as though

the beloved belonged somewhere in a diversified portfolio, alongside the second villa and

the disappointing island. Mature love begins precisely where possession ends, at the

humbling moment when we accept that another person is genuinely the other, with wishes

and interior territories over which we hold no sovereignty. Infatuation says: you are exactly

the person I have been waiting for. Mature love eventually says: you are not remotely the

person I imagined, and this turns out to be more interesting, if less convenient.

The British psychoanalyst and pediatrician Donald Winnicott wrote about the capacity to

be alone, which turns out, paradoxically, to be essential for genuine intimacy. Those

unable to tolerate solitude do not so much love other people as conscript them as

psychological life-support systems.

A good relationship demands two seemingly contradictory capacities: attachment and

separateness. Come close, but do not swallow me. Stay, but remain yourself. A long

marriage might be described as the triumph of affection over information: by year thirty,

each party possesses a substantial dossier of admissible evidence against the other, and

nonetheless the conversation continues.

Work, and the danger of making it all that’s to life

Work belongs to the good life; human beings need to create, contribute and matter.

Meaningful work gives shape to time and lets us deposit something of ourselves into the

world before the account closes. Freud is loosely, probably apocryphally, credited with

defining mental health as the capacity “to love and to work.” Whatever its provenance,

the phrase captures something real.

But work has a dangerous habit of becoming one’s complete identity rather than

expressing part of it. Ask someone at a conference reception who she is, and she will tell

you what she does. “I am a banker.” “I am a chief executive.” No one ever replies, “I am

a confused mammal, currently occupying a senior management position, and hoping

nobody asks follow-up questions.” In fact, i would often be the more accurate answer.

The danger begins the moment role and self, become indistinguishable. Retirement then

feels like a small assassination. Losing the position means losing the person, which is

why powerful people so often find leaving unbearably difficult, a pattern I have watched

with something close to professional dread across five decades of psychotherapy and

coaching. These people believe, at the outset, that they possess power. Gradually, power

possesses them instead. The office becomes a prosthetic self: the chauffeur, the title, the

colleagues laughing fractionally too hard at jokes that were not that good, all supplying

continuous evidence of significance. Remove the props, and an alarming question

surfaces: who am I when nobody is obliged to return my calls?

I have been with men (disproportionately men), in the weeks after that removal, watching

them discover that the corner office had been quietly performing the function of a skeleton.

Work, however, should express a life. It should not consume it.

The discovery of enough

Perhaps the rarest psychological achievement available to a modern human is learning

the meaning of enough. Enough money, enough success, enough winning, a word that

has, in certain circles, entirely displaced the concept of finishing. But this sounds simple

until we survey how many lives are organized around its opposite. There is always one

more deal, one more award, one more person who must finally concede that we were

right. The finish line moves because we keep moving it, telling ourselves each relocation

is the last.

At some point a brutal question becomes unavoidable: what exactly am I trying to prove,

and to whom? The imaginary tribunal presiding over our lives usually consists of people

who are dead, indifferent, or preoccupied with their own anxious tribunals, a legal

defense, assembled over eighty years, for a trial that has been indefinitely postponed.

But enough is not resignation dressed as humility. It is liberation from compulsive striving.

One can remain curious, ambitious and productive while no longer conscripting

achievement to repair the oldest wounds.

The architecture of meaning

I have found it useful to think of meaning as resting on five interlocking dimensions:

purpose, belonging, competence, control/ agency and transcendence.

Purpose asks where I am going, and why; without direction, activity curdles into busyness.

Belonging asks to whom I belong; a meaningful life is very rarely a solo production.

Competence asks whether I can do something that matters, reasonably well. Control or

agency asks whether I have authorship over my own life. Of course, total control is an

omnipotent fantasy, generally held most tightly by people whose assistants manage their

calendars. Transcendence asks what connects me to something larger than myself. For

some, it is religion; for others, children, nature, art, craft, or the stubborn hope of leaving

something behind that outlasts the mortgage.

These dimensions need one another. Purpose without belonging curdles into obsessive

ambition. Competence without purpose produces a highly successful emptiness,

beautifully upholstered. Control without relatedness becomes narcissistic self-sufficiency,

like a private island with excellent Wi-Fi and no visitors. Transcendence without contact

with reality becomes grandiosity, frequently accompanied by a foundation named after

oneself. Meaning is not a trophy to be displayed with the others; it emerges from the

weave, not from any single thread.

Beneath all five sit older questions. Who am I? To whom do I matter? What will remain

when I am gone? One of the quietly tragic ironies of executive life is arriving at the summit

only to discover, at altitude, that one has spent thirty years climbing the wrong mountain.

The good life contains suffering

Our happiness culture harbors a dangerous assumption: that suffering is evidence that

something has gone wrong. But suffering is written into the original contract, in the fine

print that nobody reads before signing. We will lose people we love. Children will choose

lives we did not design for them. Beauty will fade. No philosophy abolishes any of this. A

good life is not a life without loss; it is a life capable of absorbing loss without losing, along

with it, the capacity to keep living.

Freud distinguished mourning from melancholia. In mourning, however painful, we loosen

our grip on what has been lost and become capable of reinvesting in life. In melancholia,

something freezes solid; the lost object takes up permanent residence inside us and

continues an argument we cannot win, because the other party has stopped responding.

We mourn parents, lovers, possibilities that quietly expired without ceremony, the person

we once were. Eventually we must mourn futures that will simply not happen, a category

of loss for which there is, disgracefully, no greeting card.

Frankl understood the other half of this: meaning does not abolish suffering, but it can

alter our relationship to it. Happiness, in this light, tends to be indirect, almost shy. Pursue

it aggressively and it retreats, the way good service may vanish the instant a customer

announces he intends to leave a review. Become absorbed instead in people and

purposes that genuinely matter, and happiness occasionally wanders in, uninvited, and

stays a while.

The narrowing horizon

Ageing renders the fact of limits increasingly explicit. At twenty, life resembles an

expanding field of possibility. Later, choices acquire weight, because choosing one path

means acknowledging that the others will remain, permanently, unexplored.

Mortality converts possibility into selection, and this is not entirely bad news. There is

genuine liberation in narrowing. When time ceases to feel infinite, trivialities become more

obviously, mercifully trivial. One grows steadily less inclined to spend an afternoon

arguing with a fool, a development I regard as progress.

The Stoics, the existentialists and the psychoanalysts arrive, by different roads, at a

shared insight: limits give a life its shape. If time were infinite, almost nothing would carry

urgency. Death is what makes choosing necessary. The good life therefore requires not

merely knowing what to pursue but, with equal clarity, what to relinquish.

Growing older well is, in large part, becoming an editor of one’s own life. Some ambitions

can simply be deleted, without ceremony. Some grudges have long since gone out of

print. Some relationships should be preserved, reread. Others should have been

remaindered years ago, and we all, if honest, know which.

Generativity

The American developmental psychoanalyst Erik Erikson understood that a mature life

eventually confronts the choice between generativity and stagnation. The question quietly

changes register: what can I get? becomes, if we are fortunate, what can I give?

Generativity can take the form of children, students, institutions, books, mentorship, or

simply small, repeated ways of behaving that leave other lives slightly better than we

found them, the movement from accumulation toward transmission, containing a sly

paradox: giving things away can become its own form of acquisition, the only kind that

does not eventually require a bigger island to store it on.

The teacher lives on in the student. The founder survives in the institution, provided she

has had the wisdom to let it survive without her, a test that fails for many chief executives.

We cannot defeat mortality. But we can participate in continuity. The narcissistic fantasy

insists, however, that I must live forever. The generative person, quieter and less

exhausting to be around, says: something worthwhile can continue without me.

Erikson’s final developmental tension sits between ego integrity and despair. Can I look

back at my own life, at its mistakes, its absurdities, its wrong turns, and nevertheless

conclude: yes, that was my life, and I can accept it? Not because it all went well. Because

it was, undeniably, lived.

Play

When Freud spoke of love and work, it appears to me that he had forgotten play, an

oversight for which he has never adequately been held accountable. Play is scandalously

underrated in discussions of the good life. Fortunately, children know something adults

have systematically unlearned: not everything worthwhile requires always a purpose. We

ruin a remarkable number of pleasures by demanding they justify their own existence.

Walking becomes exercise. Reading becomes self-improvement. Hobbies become side

businesses with their own invoicing software. It is only a matter of time before someone

calculates the return on investment of watching the sunset.

Winnicott regarded play as central to psychological health because it occupies a

transitional space between inner and outer reality, a rehearsal room where we experiment

with being alive without the stakes of the main production. Sing badly. Go fishing and

catch nothing. Paint something no one will hang on the wall.

The capacity for purposeless absorption is one of the clearest signs that a person has

escaped, at least temporarily, the tyranny of performance. A person who can only justify

his existence through output is not, whatever his balance sheet suggests, entirely free.

Humor as psychological survival

And finally, there is humor, without which none of the preceding is bearable for very long.

People unable to laugh at themselves remain dangerously dependent on the fiction of

their own importance, a fiction that requires constant maintenance and never quite passes

an honest audit. Humor punctures grandiosity on contact and restores proportion faster

than any intervention I know, mine included.

The dictator cannot tolerate the cartoonist, because satire performs a psychological

disarmament. It turns the terrifying father into a man with an unfortunate moustache. The

same principle operates internally, at a smaller scale.

The capacity to laugh at ourselves allows us to acknowledge our own foolishness without

being annihilated by the acknowledgment. Self-knowledge without humor becomes

unbearable, a permanent interrogation with no recess. Humor without self-knowledge

becomes mere avoidance, charming and entirely useless. Together, imperfectly

combined, they produce something that resembles wisdom closely enough to be

mistaken for it, which, on most days, is the best any of us manage.

The final audit

Eventually the question of the good life becomes, if not easy, surprisingly simple. Imagine

that one evening the accountants of existence arrive to conduct the final audit. They will

not be impressed by the square footage of the villa, or whether the island had a decent

landing strip. Titles will have quietly expired at the door, like visitor badges nobody bothers

to collect.

Different questions will be asked instead. Did I love anybody? Did I permit myself to be

loved in return? Did I remain curious past the age when curiosity is considered dignified?

Did I become more myself, or merely more impressive to strangers? Did I live my life, or

perform it for an audience that, it now emerges, was never actually watching? Did I repair

anything that I had broken? Did I learn from suffering, or merely redistribute it to those

nearby? And, most uncomfortably: was the life I lived actually mine, or was I, for most of

it, a kind of sublet?

A life worth living is one in which we manage to love and be loved, become reasonably

ourselves, remain curious, do work that means something to us, contribute beyond the

perimeter of our own interests, tolerate life’s inevitable losses without being frozen by

them, retain some capacity for play, and look back with more gratitude than regret.

The good life is not the perfect life; a perfect life would, on inspection, be close to

intolerable. There would be no surprises, no foolish mistakes, no improbable recoveries,

and no stories worth telling at dinner. A good life contains failure, embarrassment, illness,

poor judgment, ridiculous ambitions, grief, luck, coincidence, and a substantial quantity

of misunderstanding. It contains people we should never have met and people without

whom the rest of it is unimaginable. It contains roads not taken, and several roads we

took and deeply regret.

What makes a life good is not that everything turns out well; almost nothing, on close

inspection, does. It is that, gradually and with considerable resistance, we become

capable of turning toward reality instead of away from it. We exchange omnipotence for

agency, narcissism for relatedness, possession for appreciation, compulsion for choice,

achievement for meaning, accumulation for generativity, certainty for curiosity, and, if we

are fortunate, ambition for gratitude. The final psychological task may simply be to stop

demanding that life become something other than what it already, stubbornly, is.

This is not passivity. It means recognizing the extraordinary improbability of having been

here at all. For a brief interval, matter became conscious and answered, somewhat

bewildered, to our name. We loved, quarreled, worried about money, desired unsuitable

people, made avoidable mistakes, told stories anyway, watched children grow taller than

expected, buried friends far too early, planted trees whose shade we will never sit

beneath, and occasionally, in the middle of all that busyness, looked up and noticed that

the evening light was beautiful.

Then, inevitably, the curtain begins its descent. There is no negotiating an extension with

the management, however senior one’s title. The tragedy is that the play ends. The

comedy, and it is, unmistakably, a comedy, is how much of the run we spent anxiously

reading the reviews instead of performing the play. Perhaps a life worth living consists,

finally, in discovering this early enough to stop rehearsing for an audience that was never

there, and to start, before the lights come down, actually enjoying the performance.

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