What is a life well lived?

Recently a podcaster named Broderick Rodell asked me to do a podcast on a life well lived. You can check out our podcast here. Generating an Integrally informed approach led me to an integration of Abraham Maslow, the DRD4 explorer gene, and the foundation idea that subjective progress on whatever is the most current need/motivation system leads to a sense of a life being well lived. Add onto this criterion velocity, problem solving/drama, the free energy theory of consciousness striving to reduce uncertainty, ego as the human orientation reflex navigating external and interior infinity, and self-evaluation shifting with current vMEME and states of defense or social engagement, and it turns into quite an interesting model.

The idea of a life well lived takes us to transpersonal psychology, which always leads to Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Moving forward on relevant needs feels like a life well lived. How we navigate the present moment through these needs determines the universe we’re constantly cocreating.

Progress with currently relevant needs/motivations feels like a well lived life. 

Who’s doing this feeling? It is Self, I, ego. 

150 years ago Freud revealed the human unconscious to the world and suggested three structures—the ego (I), the superego demanding observer (we), and our myriad drives and hungers in our id (it). Ego is the felt sense of me.

We orient to the outside world like all living things. Unlike other life, self-aware human consciousness orients to its own infinite interiors. Central to all navigation are our current motivations, and Maslow’s hierarchy of needs covers quite a few of them.

Maslow’s hierarchy of needs (motivations).

• Survival
• Comfort 
• Belonging
• Cognitive (purpose)
• Aesthetic
• Self-esteem
• Self-actualizing
• Self-transcendent
• Selfless service
• Spontaneous transformation

Problem solving and drama. 

Psychologist Gregory Lester suggests we are either healthy people generally engaged in problem solving (how psychiatrist W. John Livesly defines normal functioning) or less healthy people caught up in the drama triangle (what psychiatrist Stephen Karpman defined as persecutor, victim, and rescuer systems forming the basis of most pathological relating). 

Orientation reflex.

• Unlike all other life, self-aware humans navigate their own interior worlds—we don’t just have to deal with infinity externally; we have to face infinity internally. It is so challenging being a human!
• With ego development we see/feel/sense/hear/understand progressively more. If we grow through self-determining autonomous stages, we begin to feel like less of a separate self and more something else living through us. At every level, we experience our self navigating the current moment for better (progress on needs/motivations) or worse (caught up in drama).
• Beautiful, good, and true values/experiences differ with vMEME, including and transcending each other throughout development. A subjective pleasurein being true to our values while making progress on needs/motivations is universal in every vMEME.
• Beautiful: we generally don’t mind if others share our opinion of what’s aesthetically pleasing or repulsive.
• Good:We do care if others share values, and clarifying and working with values is a central activity of all change work. In my sessions I don’t teach values as much as help people live their core values and be open to refining them as they grow.
• True: We all crave our understanding of the universe to be accurate. This can be blind faith, scientism demanding empirical data, or Integral relativism always open to a better idea cross validated through all 8 zones. 

We crave the pleasure of finding uncertainty and reducing it. We do better personally and socially the more advanced we are on the integration-of-defenses line. We are happier problem solving that caught up on the drama triangle. These all guide us in addressing needs/motivations.

Generally, the subjective sense of moving forward on whatever need/motivation is most important in the moment leads to a sense of a life well lived.