what is a good life

« Moderation should be promoted beyond all.

Trying to follow the extremes will not lead you anywhere.

Balance brings inner tranquillity and peace to each individual, and since the soul trumps the external and the body, balance brings exterior calm as well.

The result is a whole society in balance, which permits harmony, just like Plato promotes it ( The Republic ).

One should seek for moderate happiness instead of up- and-downs or intensive pleasures, for the latter will mean indeed extreme happiness, but also suffering.

For example, in the Civilization and Its Discontents , Freud suggests a same “middle ground” as Plato : just like intoxicants may be a measure that palliates us from bearing the suffering of the world, influencing our own constitution by anaesthetising us, 'the displacements of the libido' also free us from the pain by substituting our need into another.

Yet, we should not use them constantly, but rather on a spare pace, for they are harmful and dangerous : danger of physical health for t he former, danger of mental health –delusion-- for the latter.

* 7 * Be ambitious, else it means you have no purpose in your life.

By having a goal, an ultimate one for which you will daily strive, you will not be bored, hence relieved from one of the enemies, apart from pain, of happiness, which is boredom, as Schopenhauer elucidates it in On the Suffering of the World.

Do not listen to Plato, for the static society he promotes, in which every one should fully fulfil their own role and only this role, genuinely implies that humankind is devoid of ambition...

a little bit too idealistic and sincerely impossible! * 8 * You may cross many ends in your life, but the ultimate one is and should be the pursuit of happiness --- only the quest, because one may never achieve happiness, as no one is happy in the way he thinks he is ( Aristotle).

* 9 * You make look at me in another way if I tell you that you and your life are around essence and accidents, but you are, indeed.

Essence, meaning anything immutable, is in your case the 'inner substance', hormones, nerves that control your happiness.

It is in fact your potentiality of being happy, that can be explored by accidents -- meaning in contrast changeable characteristics.

During your lifetime, you will encou nter more or less incidents that will please you and make you happy.

Inducing that the ultimate end can be learned and achieved.

* 10 * Be conscious of the cruelty of this world.

Men were born to suffer : from your parents' dictatureship, your professor s' absurd amount of homework, your bosses' profuse orders, your husband's domination and laziness or wife's middle age mental crises...

Pain can both affect your physical body but also your mentality.

The former mostly designates pain coming from work, tur moil, disease ; the latter pain coming from your imagination, thoughts.

You can overcome sadness, anxiety, and every other mental suffering by controlling your will (Schopenhauer ).

For the brain in fact is the center of the body and dictates each and ever y mood of yours.

* 11 * The fundamental act, just like Rousseau says in The Social Contract that it is for members in the same family – the first society -- to satisfy each other's needs, is for Marx ( The German Ideology) to produce means to satisfy our needs, both physical ones and of the mind.

In fact, the whole society is based upon one universal and unequivocal substructure : economy/money.. »