The Best Life?

Life itself is a question, very hard to answer — or an answer to a question never asked. Along with this dire doubt, adding the adjective in front of it without any clarification is weird, if you ask me. But what determines good or bad, better or worse, best or worst? Any combination of these two adjectives gives meaning when attached to life, yet the meaning shifts depending on who is holding the measuring stick and what century they happen to be standing in.

In times past, priests set the rules for the best life. Connecting or being close to the divine — obedience, ritual, humility before God — these were the coordinates by which a life could be plotted and judged. The blueprint was clear. Follow it and you were promised something beyond this life, which conveniently made the suffering inside this life easier to tolerate and easier to administrate.

But did these rules ever work for all humans to have a good life? The serf who prayed daily and died young of famine was technically following the blueprint. The woman who devoted herself entirely to a God she was told to fear — was hers a best life, or simply a disciplined one? The priestly prescription always had fine print, and the fine print was usually written by someone who stood to benefit from your obedience.

And yet the hunger the priest was feeding was real. The need for direction, for meaning, for someone to say — this is the way, follow it — that need did not go away when faith began to loosen its grip. It never goes away. Which is why the priest never really disappeared. They simply changed clothes.

Artists show the life they see through their art — painting life in color, writing life in verses, composing life in music, singing it through song. Do they all say something about the best life? Perhaps. But what they say contradicts itself beautifully and offers no clean instructions.

Van Gogh painted with uncontainable ecstasy and despair simultaneously. Keats wrote of beauty while dying young and broke. Billie Holiday sang of love with a voice shaped entirely by suffering. If art is evidence of anything, it is that intensity of experience — not happiness, not comfort, not achievement — is what humans find worth expressing. The artist does not hand you a formula. They hand you a mirror and let you sit with the discomfort of what you see.

This is not a clean answer. It is barely even a hint. But it is honest — which is more than what came next.

The motivational speaker of the twentieth century was essentially a priest who had traded the pulpit for a conference stage and God for potential. Norman Vincent Peale, Dale Carnegie, Napoleon Hill — these men were selling salvation with the serial numbers filed off. The language was secular but the structure was identical: you are lost, I have found the way, here is what obedience looks like in this century. People recognized the shape of it, which is partly why the genre was always slightly embarrassing to admit to.

So the costume changed again.

The politician discovered that charisma could substitute for argument. That if you made people feel understood — truly seen, in their frustration and their fear — they would follow you somewhere the facts alone would never take them. The best politicians of the modern era are not the most intelligent or the most honest. They are the most ministerial. They give the sermon, they name the enemy, they promise the promised land. The congregation fills the stadium and feels, briefly, that their life has direction.

This is not governance. This is pastoral care with a ballot attached.

Then came the comedian, and this is where it gets genuinely interesting — and genuinely dangerous. The comedian earned trust by performing skepticism. By appearing to be the one person in the room who wasn't selling anything, who would say the thing nobody else would say, who laughed at all the other preachers. This is an extraordinarily powerful position to occupy.

Joe Rogan is perhaps the clearest modern example — a man whose entire brand is built on the aesthetic of just asking questions, just having conversations, just being a regular curious person. And yet millions of people quietly restructure their worldview around what he finds interesting on a given Tuesday. The comedian preaches most effectively precisely because the sermon doesn't look like one.

And then, the endpoint of this long lineage: the influencer.

The influencer is the final distillation of everything that came before — the priest's authority, the politician's charisma, the comedian's relatability — compressed into a personal brand and distributed through a phone screen. What makes the influencer uniquely modern is that they do not even claim expertise. They claim something far more seductive than expertise. They claim a life. They hold up their existence as the argument.

Look at my morning. My body. My apartment. My relationship. My peace of mind. This could be yours.

The product being sold is not a book or a policy or even an idea. It is the image of a life worth wanting, monetized at every pixel. And the transaction is so seamless, so embedded in entertainment and aesthetics, that the audience rarely notices they are kneeling.

What connects the priest to the influencer across all these centuries and costumes is not malice — most of them probably believe what they are saying, which is almost worse. What connects them is the exploitation of a genuine and very human ache: the suspicion that other people have figured out something about living that you have not. That somewhere there is an answer, and someone has it, and if you follow them closely enough, pay attention carefully enough, buy in completely enough, it might finally become yours.

It never does. But the ache remains. And so the preacher always has an audience.

So what, then, is the best life?

It would be dishonest to offer a clean answer here, because doing so would make this essay guilty of the very sin it has spent its length examining. What can be said, with some confidence, is this — any definition of the best life that arrives pre-packaged, that requires no friction, that asks nothing of you except belief and purchase, should be held with great suspicion. The priest asked you to kneel. The artist bled. The philosopher admitted confusion. The preacher in every modern costume asks only that you watch, follow, and subscribe.

The best life, if such a thing exists at all, is probably not something you are told. It is something you stumble into — or construct slowly, imperfectly, from the materials of your own particular confusion. It may not be recognizable as best by any external standard. It may not photograph well. It may not have a morning routine.

It may simply be a life that was genuinely lived — question and all.