I recently took part in a panel with fourteen other thinkers and philosophers. The topic: what it means to live a good life in a more-than-human world. There is much to be said and written about it. Much already has, and now every social media influencer has their take on it. This isn’t that — a prescriptive platitude or, worse, bullshit. It’s also not the long version. It is the short one, where I try to put my brief intervention into writing.

So, here’s an idea. A good life is one in which the answer to the question what is a good life? will never be known — where one understands the question has no absolute or universal answer — and which, despite that, continues to interest, even to excite; a life that carries the paradox with enough comfort to be lived without incapacitating suffering, and without bothering others too much about it.

The next day, at the closing “picnic” of the conference that hosted the panel, another thought arrived — while I stood in a cubicle of the rooftop bathroom. The thought: we will not be any closer to knowing what a good life is so long as, at a conference of (supposedly) educated, evolved people who say they want a better world, the toilet remains unflushed and the cubicle floor stays soaked — paper, and other things not worth describing.

Whatever else a good life is, it cannot be one whose answer ignores its consequences in the lives of others.