My Path to Seeking the Good Life - Part 1

Why does the idea of a good life matter? In this essay I explain where I am coming from when writing Seeking the Good Life, with some thoughts about my own influences.

A few days before my 39^th birthday England entered its first lockdown in response to the Covid pandemic. A year later I turned 40. Again, we were in lockdown. It wasn’t much of a celebration. But that really didn’t matter. Forty has an importance to me that isn’t just about getting older. It wasn’t something to celebrate, but instead, it was asking me to reflect and ponder on my life and its meaning.

Why am I here?

What is my purpose?

What will I leave behind?

Okay, it was about getting older, but it wasn’t just that. Let’s be honest, I don’t think I’d have been much fun at a birthday party, anyway!

Forty matters because of the silliest of things: the 1970s sitcom called The Good Life, which I’ve mentioned before in this newsletter. Running to 30 episodes, The Good Life told the story of Tom Good and his wife, Barbara quitting the rat race and taking up self-sufficiency in their suburban house. They lived for the moment and were happy.

I wasn’t born when The Good Life first aired, but the BBC repeated it enough times for my parents to record it on Betamax tapes. Episodes of The Good Life repeated over and over throughout my childhood. I soon knew every episode by heart and could laugh at the jokes before they aired.

I was watching and re-watching these episodes in the 1980s. This was Thatcher’s Britain; a somewhat fraught decade in which it was becoming increasingly obvious that there was something not quite right with the world. Even as a child, I could spot this. There was a yearning amongst the adults to escape the rat race, to be something slightly different than what society had made them. As a child, the ‘Good Life’ seemed to me to be a genuinely good life and one that was worth pursuing and seeking out.

Jump forward to the early-2000s.

I’m studying History at the University of Hull and for some reason, I’m visiting London with a friend. I can’t really remember why or how this happened. It just did. We visited the Tate. At the time there was an exhibition that included a wall of photographs of ordinary people holding up a sign with a few words that they had written on it. The words were something that they felt. Something secret. Something hidden. An inner calling that they were otherwise afraid to express. I latched on to one of those photographs.  

I even brought a postcard of it.

The photograph depicted a blond-haired man in a suit. He was smart and business-like. A true professional. A success. That, at least, was what came across in the picture.

Suit = Success.

An equation that remains as deceptive now as it did back then. The sign that the man held had just two words written on it: ‘I’m desperate’.

Image Gillian Wearing (Tate)

I’m desperate. That could mean a multitude of things and likely, only that man knows what he meant, when he wrote those words. I guess the idea of the exhibit was not just to show the inner thoughts of ordinary people, but for the audience to think about what they believed the words meant. Or, what those words mean to them. That certainly was the case for me. Why the man in a suit wrote ‘I’m desperate’ wasn’t important to me. I was looking at it ten years later. What it told me though about myself was a surprise.

Don’t do it. Don’t go into a job that makes you wear a suit.

I was only a year or two away from that prospect. Soon I would have a degree and a choice. What to do with my life? Where to work? What industry to choose? My inner voice was screaming at me.

Don’t do it. Buy that postcard. Stick it on the corkboard. Look at it. Think about it. Avoid at all and any cost.

I have a pesky inner voice. Very demanding.

I brought that postcard and for years it was indeed pinned to a corkboard in my room (wherever that happened to be at the time).

It wasn’t the suit that bothered me, but the expectation. This is what life is. You get an education, you put on a suit and go to work, then you retire. The end.

Is that really it?

That pesky inner voice again. There’s nothing innately wrong with such a life. By working you contribute to society, you earn money to do the things that you want, and you get a pension at the end of it all. It works. People respect you for that. Or do they? I’ve never really been sure.

It took me years to work out why that photograph had such an impact on me. If The Good Life had suggested to me that a good life is a self-sufficient life, free of the demands of the corporate world, then other sitcoms had shown me the horrors of that world. The Rise and Fall of Reginald Perrin might be said to be another inspiration (although I have no intention of faking my own death or acting quite as crazed!).

The suit is a cage. Even now, I’m not entirely sure why or how I came to that conclusion. Sitcoms had their part to play (bizarrely!). Other things from my childhood too. One of my fondest holidays was in Wales, where we visited the Centre for Alternative Technology (CAT). There I caught a glimpse of life outside the cage. No suits, only people. An attempt to side-step normal, to see what could be done as an alternative to the status quo.

These childhood memories had an impact, but it has taken me decades to figure them out, and, indeed, I still am working it all out. What is the good life? This question doesn’t define me as such, but my need to identify it continues to shape the world I live in.

BTW When writing this essay, I searched online to learn more about that photograph. It formed part of a collection by artist Gillian Wearing called Signs that Say What you Want them to Say and Not Signs that Say what Someone Else wants you to Say. The suited man was photographed in 1992. It was taken just after the financial crash of the early 90s. 

Part 2 next week, where I move beyond the early 2000s and discuss a decade when I tried a partially self-sufficient good life…