I used to think my life was meant to be planned out by my parents. They set their expectations to be higher than I could achieve, and designated me on a path to pursue the life they never got. As a result, their intentions led me to learn to think more for myself and create my own ambitions because of how conflicted my beliefs were compared to theirs. I started learning how to change my life and figured out what I wanted to do for myself, and I realized something: people avoid creating a purpose for their lives because they believe the process to do so is meaningless. I’ve had my friends ask me, “Why should we create a vision when it’s impossible to achieve those things anyway?”. The most interesting thing I’ve observed over the years of working several minimum wage-paying jobs is that all the successful people I know have a clear goal for their lives. They always seem to know what to do next, every time they accomplish a set goal. I’ve also known people and have met those who are stuck and act like they’re passing time in life without joy or aspiration; it’s those people who don’t have a vision. I began to realize this when I started interacting with my college peers.
To summarize my experience in learning my life’s purpose, I can confidently say that my vision of the good life can be achieved by thinking for myself, with the addition of considering and interacting with the similar and contrasting beliefs of those in my community. One way I was able to incorporate the thought process of reading with and against the grain was through interactions with people in my core class. Subtle moments like sharing our opinions on different philosophies in class to meeting up with my friends for our group project on the Gospel of Matthew expanded my way of understanding different texts. A specific interaction I noticed that pushes me to stay open-minded and read in another perspective is when my understanding of the text doesn’t coincide with my discussion partner’s understanding. In that case, it encourages me to read through another lens since everyone’s interpretations are influenced differently by their experiences.
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Throughout the fall quarter, I was always drawn back to Sartre’s emphasis on the existence of the individual person as a free and responsible agent through acts of their own will. I was especially focusing on Sartre’s text in ‘Basic Writings of Existentialism’ because of the amount of time I spent with the text and the pre-college environment I was surrounded by. Funny enough, the only other text I could connect with my vision of a good life was the Tao Te Ching, the final reading of the quarter. In the 81 translated verses, it presents a suggestion on how to live in a society with goodness and integrity: an essential insight in a world where it isn’t common for people to understand such a concept.
In the excerpt of Sartre’s interpretation of existentialism in ‘Basic Writings of Existentialism’, he spawns all of his teachings from the idea that existence precedes essence, “[which] means that, first of all, man exists, turns up, appears on the scene, and only afterwards, defines himself...he himself will have made what he will be” (Marino, 345). We construct our own nature where first, we are thrown into life without a predetermined nature, and only later by our actions can we develop our nature or essence. As a child of a low-income Asian family, high expectations were forced out of me with no purpose in my own search for self-identity. The beginning of my road in discovering my ‘essence’ sparked when I rebelled against my family’s ways of raising me as a teenager. I had finally decided for myself that I wanted to focus on playing for a soccer team rather than spending a majority of my time taking classical piano lessons. From there on out, I began developing an independent characteristic that became noticeable to the people around me.
“When a military officer takes the responsibility for an attack and sends a certain number of men to death, he chooses to do so, and in the main he alone makes the choices. Doubtless, orders come from above, but they are too broad; he interprets them, and on this interpretation depend on the lives of ten or fourteen or twenty men. In making a decision he cannot help having a certain anguish. All leaders know this anguish. That doesn’t keep them from acting; on the contrary, it is the very condition of their action. For it implies that they envisage a number of possibilities, and when they choose one, they realize that it has value only because it is chosen” (Marino, 348). This quote from the Sartre excerpt illustrates the principle that in certain similar circumstances, if something is morally correct for one person to do, it must also be morally correct for anyone. He displays the burden of the military leader’s choice as ‘anguish’, and portrays the idea by intending that we are all in a state of anguish performing actions, the outcome of which we cannot determine, with a great weight of responsibility. Understanding the text as much as possible as the author intended, the meaning behind the example drew a comparable connection to my experience in high school as captain of the girls’ varsity soccer team (not in scale of severity as Sartre’s example). With a coach who gives vague ideas as to what he is expecting, I have to interpret it to the best of my abilities. The hardest decision made throughout this experience was having to decide to play players between those who could not execute the ideas the coach displayed, but attended practice every single day, or players who had the ability to fulfill the coach’s goals, but did not show up to practices as much. Deciding between skill and commitment both had its positives and negatives. Choosing a player with more skills and less commitment led to a negative reaction from the overall team because of the significance of responsibility that is stressed in team sports, and picking a player with more commitment and a lower skill level resulted in an unsuccessful game. The team’s reaction to my choice was the anguish I had to experience no matter what choice I made, but I knew my decision was what I thought was the best interpretation of my coach’s orders. The message expressed in the overall example supports the idea that ‘good’ is not meant to be read in a moral sense.
What the Tao Te Ching is doing is trying to show us how we could see things if we spend more time in consciousness and less time in naming; maybe if we were more conscious, we would be less stressed and better able to see what needs to be done. But the main idea the Tao Te Ching advises us is to be aware of our own self. Chapter 13 of the translated verses says to “Love the world as your own self; then you can truly care for all things” (Tsu, 15). Reading with the grain, this sentence asked me what it would be like if I cared for all things as much as I cared for my own self. I can confidently say that if I love myself the same way I love the world, I have the ability to take care of society as a whole. This idea can easily be identified in my vision of the good life because my independence in society creates ambitious beliefs to look at the world in a philanthropic perspective. Despite the exception of reading ‘good’ in a moral sense, part of my belief in living my best life is to carry out the work that those who are less fortunate cannot. Once my journey to self-realization began, I came to acknowledge that I have the ability and privilege to gain trust from my community. Chapter 17 illustrates the idea that: “Very few people are aware of the highest./ Then comes that which they know and love,/ Then that which is feared,/ Then that which is despised./ Those who do not trust enough will not be trusted./ When actions are performed/ Without unnecessary talk,/ People say, ‘We did it!’” (Tsu, 19). The best leaders are those who do things calmly and are careful with their words because they get things done in an unobtrusive way, so well executed that the people believe they accomplish everything all by themselves. This concept connects back to my nature to provide philanthropic acts for my community as a vision of the good life. As a result, it is always carried out with integrity. Such a specific and morally supported belief can be supported by a similar opinion made by Bruce Thompson during his course lecture on Genesis. He stated that we are responsible for each other, connecting his belief with the rhetorical question that Cain asks the Lord: “Am I my brother’s keeper?”. “Yes.”
As an affiliate of Stevenson College at UCSC, the evolution of my thinking has been greatly influenced by the interactions made between my peers and the connection of real-life virtue with the given texts. I am extremely grateful to have made great friends throughout the start of my college experience. They have greatly influenced the way I interact with my community, and I believe that every moment spent with them influenced my purpose in life.
Goals are accomplishments that you strive to accomplish. The vision of the good life defines who you want to be, what you want to be remembered for, and the accomplishments you want to achieve. Your vision defines your goals by providing a structure to assess those goals. In conclusion, my vision of the good life reads purposeful action for the benefit of the community.
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