Good Life Analysis

Everyone in life has their own journey. Life is not based upon one ultimate goal. A good life overall depends on how you live it and what perspective it is in. For a man that does not have a home, his good life could be living in a shelter and being surrounded with people just like him. The woman who just got a promotion and is now celebrating with her fiance. From the little things in life to the “never would have thought this would be happening,” the good life all depends on the person.

The movie A Better Life directed by Chris Weitz is the story of a troubled family who is trying to overcome the cultural barriers that have been thrown in their direction. A father named Carlos is trying to earn a living in order to provide his son Luis a better life than he has endured. The family moved from Mexico to California when Luis was a small baby. The audience learns throughout the movie that Luis’ mother left shortly after the move because she found bigger and better things. By doing this she left Carlos to take care of Luis and battle all of the negative influences in the society such as fighting and gangs. Over time, Carlos and his son drift apart and are now at the awkward teen phase.

The movie “A Better Life” is about an illegal immigrant Carlos and his son Luis. They are constantly at odds and his father works very hard and is still very poor. His son Luis is being influenced by local gangs that his father doesn’t approve of. Carlos strives to be self-employed however his vehicle is stolen and he and Luis set off to find out who took and get it back. Once he gets his vehicle back he is arrested and deported. His son and he have one last meeting before he is sent back to Mexico and he begs him to succeed. The end of the movie show Carlos being led back across by a coyote and is determined to go home.

The existence of evil in the world seems to make it impossible for us to have a meaningful life. In fact, Dostoevsky argues that evil is utterly unacceptable and that the suffering it brings a¬bout can never be justified. Is Dostoevsky’s argument unconfutable or do you believe that the meaning of life in the world can still be rescued even in the face of radical evil?

The concept of living “the good life” means something different for everyone. There is a general understanding that living “the good life” is associated with unyielding happiness and lasting satisfaction. The exact meaning of this desired life was pondered by thinkers and philosophers for hundreds of years. They constructed principals of behavior, thought, and obligation that would categorize a person as “good”. Although some of these ancient philosophies about “the good life” had overlapping ideas, their concepts varied widely. This contrast of ideas can be examined through two major characters in two famous works: Aeneas in “The Aeneid” and Socrates in “The Apology”. Aeneas exemplifies the philosophy that the direct route to “the good life" is through faith, trust in the Gods, and family, while Socrates in “The Apology” emphasizes free will, and vast knowledge of life.

What is the meaning of life? According to Chris McCandless living free and not conforming to the natural way of life is the meaning to life, as shown in the book Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer. Similar to Chris McCandless, Ralph Emerson believes that following your dreams and making your own trail is the meaning of life according to his short story “Self-Reliance” by Ralph Emerson. The purpose of man's existence is to avoid conformity and following one's own instincts and ideas.

I watched the 2011 movie “A Better Life”, directed by Chris Weitz for this assignment. This

In Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Frederick Douglass mentions that slaves do not have the privilege to have an education. In “Nicomachean Ethics,” Aristotle explains that without happiness, doing something good will not really matter because you will not be happy. In “Slavery,” Jean-Jacques Rousseau mentions that war is not the key to end slavery because war is only for states not against man to man. In “Thinking in Education,” John Dewey says that thinking is another method in learning because it will help students reflect on things. Life can be wonderful if people learn to find ways to keep that happiness in them.

When I was a little girl, my hopes and dreams for life were to marry a very rich man and live in a house that had a gardener. I would be lying in the grass outside on a hot summer day imagining the life I would once live. A large house with as many dogs as you can imagine, a maid to do all of the dishes and laundry, a drawer for every object in the house, and not a day to ever worry about money.

Overall, I have had a decent life, I grew up going to church and being taught from an early age rights and wrongs. My parent taught me to be kind, respectful and fair to people. I feel that I am who I am based on the experiences that occurred throughout my life, thus forming me into who I am today. And even though I have had some hardships throughout my life I know that it gets better and that I should strive toward my goals of becoming the best

As a child, I grew up in a Christian family where my dad would read to my siblings and me from the Westminster Catechism. The first question from this text asks “What is the chief end of man?” And the matching response is “To glorify God and enjoy Him forever.” This seemingly simple answer is something I have taken to heart and strive to live out in my daily life. For me, this looks like spending time in the Word, journaling, talking with friends and people I come into contact with about their lives, and trying to maintain a positive attitude even when things don’t go quite as I had planned. I think glorifying God and truly resting and enjoying His peace and presence is

Let us see, I could say my life was the All American dream, where mom brings lemonade to the kids, while they harass the dog in the front yard, surrounded by a white picket fence. Or it could be that my life was a fairy tale, one that seems good on the outside but on the inside seemed to me a never ending nightmare. I could go on and on about how good of a life I live, or I could say all the horrible things that have happened, but I’d rather just explain what has shaped me into the person I am today, because that is what a home environment does to a person.

In, “This Too Is Life”, the author, Lu Hsun, writes about his thoughts on life and its values as he is dying of illness. Hsun first explains the duality of exhaustion and rest, the fearfulness of exhaustion and not being able what you have to do as you have already done too much. The fear of missing out on the active, productive parts or life where you feel like you are truly living, coupled at the same time with the blissfulness of rest and simply doing nothing and having nothing to do, experiencing the comforts of idleness. In these moments of inactivity, it is easy to feel as if one is not really living life, that life has no purpose if one is not being productive. But, what Hsun is trying to express

The concept of the good life is one that comes up frequently in the PULSE program because it centers on the core beliefs of the program itself; personal and social responsibility. To me, the nature of the good life entails of knowledge, happiness, justice, and introspection. Through my exploration of the good life, I hope to clarify how I view the good life in accordance to Aristotle and Plato, but also, how I perceive the good life in general. Service is an important portion of the PULSE program, which is why the good life has to be related to it. The belief that service can lead to the good life will allow me to explore the importance of service for the good life, thus, I will be able to explore how PULSE will affect my version of the good life. By connecting the good life to my own personal life, I can clarify how it differs and how it is similar to how Aristotle and Plato defined the good life. Through this, I will be able to connect the good life to my experiences and can investigate how my experiences have influenced my version of the good life. Through my examination of Plato’s and Aristotle’s work, I hope to explain what the good life means to me, and how I hope to achieve it, in and outside of my service placement.

It is common sense that all the human beings would like to live a happy life and they will spare no efforts in order to realize the purpose of really living a happy life in the end. However, different people have different definitions toward what a happy life is and they tend to have different standards as for how a life is that can be regarded as a happy life. There is no doubt that people will then try different means in order to pursue a happy life based on their definition toward what a happy life is. Therefore, the following will talk about the pursuit of a happy life from the perspectives of both Dalai Lama in The Art of Happiness and Viktor E. Frankl in Man’s Searching for Meaning, during which the experiences of some characters from the film Forrest Gump will be applied as evidence. Generally speaking, the pursuit of a happy life in the minds of Dalai Lama and Viktor E. Frankl can be achieved via experiencing sufferings and adversity. It is hoped that this analysis can help people understand what a happy is from a different point of view.