Steiner – What does it mean to live a “good” life?

This is another excerpt from a book of poems, sayings, and other bits of wisdom that our friend Heather’s father left as a legacy for his family, entitled Bread for the Journey. This is a quote from Claude Steiner, French-American psychotherapist and writer, and founder of the concept of “Radical Psychiatry”:

“Many of us are proudest when we feel that we are living ‘good’ lives, where ‘good’ means normal, average, as others would want it to be – others whom we respect and admire and who have told us what a good life is.

Being married, successful in business, a good father, a good housewife, a civic leader, a ‘real’ man or a ‘real’ woman are all defined for us long before we are born; we are given the illusory ‘freedom’ to choose those different ways of living.

Once we choose, we are forced to keep to the directives of that particular life plan, lest we become ‘failures’ in living. The fact that blueprints for our everyday lives are, at best, extraordinarily unsatisfying is something that people find out only after they have spent a lifetime attempting to live according to the rules – too late to do anything about it!

Yet, ironically, when we wonder, after we followed all the rules, why our lives seemed senseless, we tend to blame ourselves rather than question what others told us to do.”