The map to a good life

2026 09 16 Owen Yang

The secret to a good life has been cracked. It has been all over the cheap podcasts and AI-generated content, but nevertheless I am in high agreement with it. It will be possessing wealth, possessing time, good health, and good relationships.

To clarify, as I understand that having good relationships is a famous new concept from the Harvard Study of Adult Development. Read The Good Life by Marc Schulz and Robert Waldinger. The rest (wealth, time, and health) are just obvious parts that we already knew.

I would like to add that we can only work with what we have, rather than compare ourselves to others. Within ourselves, if we have too much wealth then we need to learn to translate this to create time, health, and relationships.

Counterintuitively, I guess this also means if we have good health but not enough money, time, and relationships, we do have to use this resource to create other well-life elements.

We might also want to inspect the best balance in our life, as I guess some people really value one over another. But for everyone I feel this framework is useful for us to create a roadmap to our version of a good life.

As a medical doctor, I would prefer advising on achieving good health, but this also means being aware of other aspects of my patients because it is not always helpful to maximise health at the expense of other well-life elements.

At the same time, if someone possesses wealth, time, or good relationships, they should be advised to translate them into health whenever appropriate.

Read Do we need a purpose in life?