We learn how to make a living, but not how to make a good life

My father was an ideal product of the American public education system from the middle of the 20th century.

Neither of his parents finished high school, much less attended college. His father had quit school after the sixth grade in order to help support his family. They were smart people — and my grandfather was incredibly well-read — but nobody in previous generations had even thought about being educated at a university.

The boom in taxpayer funding for colleges after World War II enabled both of my parents to go to college. They met as students at Jacksonville State (Ala.) University and married right after graduation. Both started their careers as teachers. My father soon moved to Southern Railway, where he was an executive in the Safety Department.

He had been well-prepared for corporate life in 20th century America. He was successful and he was paid well. When I was young, we lived the upper-middle class lifestyle in various cities as he was transferred around the South.

But something was wrong in his heart or his soul.

He didn’t learn what really mattered in life, not when it mattered. He lived in ways that caused three wives to leave him for good. He embezzled millions of dollars from an employer after he left the railroad. He treated his three children so badly that all three eventually cut off contact with him.

In the final months of his life, he was thinking about killing himself. After his death in 2018, I discovered a journal he had been keeping. What you see above is the last page of the journal, just six months before he died.

My father’s education had been badly incomplete. He had been taught how to make a living, but he never learned how to live a good life. And that might have been what killed him.

I’ve been thinking lately that something has gone badly wrong in the way our society handles its education of children. I’m not talking about poor academic preparation. That’s a different subject and it’s beyond the scope of what I’m talking about here.

We spend enormous amounts of money and effort teaching young people how to make a living, but spend comparatively little helping them understand what makes a life worth living.

As a result, we have many millions of people who know how to earn money and know how to live as modern consumers — but who are remarkably empty when it comes to the question of how to live.

Nobody’s ever taught them how to build good lives.

Families and religious institutions once spent a great deal of time trying to shape character. They asked questions that had nothing to do with careers or income. What kind of person should you become? Which virtues matter? What obligations do you owe your neighbors? What makes a life honorable? What kind of legacy should you leave behind?

Those institutions weren’t perfect. Families failed. Religious leaders often failed. People often fell short of the ideals they claimed to believe. But they were at least attempting to answer questions that many of us barely ask anymore.

As those institutions have declined in influence, we’ve quietly allowed a vacuum to develop. We still devote enormous effort to preparing people to earn a living, but we increasingly leave each person to discover — if he discovers it at all — what makes a life good.

Nature abhors a vacuum.

If we stop intentionally teaching people what is worthy of admiration, the popular culture will answer the question for us. It will celebrate whatever it already rewards. Wealth. Status. Influence. Consumption. Visibility. Career success. None of those things is necessarily bad, but they make poor substitutes for character.

That’s one reason why so many people seem strangely empty despite having lives that appear successful from the outside.

We’ve become extraordinarily good at accumulating things.

We’ve become much less intentional about becoming better human beings.

That difference matters because every choice we make carries an opportunity cost. We like to pretend that we can have it all, but life doesn’t work that way. Every hour spent pursuing one goal is an hour that cannot be spent pursuing another. Every expensive lifestyle commits us to years of future labor. Every new possession costs us something far more valuable than money.

Henry David Thoreau expressed the idea beautifully when he wrote, “The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.”

Life.

Not money.

That’s the currency we’re really spending.

The larger and more complicated our lives become, the more of that finite currency we must exchange to sustain them. We become caretakers of houses, cars, careers and possessions that often end up owning us as much as we own them.

That’s why I’ve come to believe that a simpler life isn’t a form of deprivation. It’s a form of freedom.

The greatest luxury isn’t owning the biggest house or driving the newest car. It’s arranging your life so that more of your remaining time actually belongs to you. Time to love your family. Time to serve others. Time to become wiser. Time to cultivate friendships. Time to create something worthwhile. Time to become the kind of person you hope to be remembered as.

Those things don’t happen accidentally. They require intentional choices. They require tradeoffs. They require saying no to some perfectly good opportunities in order to say yes to better ones.

Each of us must decide what kind of life we want to live. Our schools can’t answer that question for us. Our employers can’t answer it. Politicians certainly can’t answer it.

But if we never ask the question ourselves, we’ll almost certainly spend our lives pursuing whatever our culture happens to applaud.

The public education system gave my father a lot of knowledge and skills. He was smart and well-read and capable. He was the very picture of what was considered success for his day.

But he spent the last months of his life wanting to die. He had lost all the people who had wanted to love him. He had made choices so selfish that nobody was there for him at the end.

At some point — and it’s unclear when — he just stopped eating. By the time someone discovered him, his life was ebbing away. There had been no health issues of note. He had just lost the will to live. And he died in a hospital shortly after that.

My father was a very practical and well-educated man. He had all the tools that should have given him a wildly successful life. He had women who wanted to give him love. He had children who wanted loving relationships with him.

But he somehow never learned how to live a good life. And the sad end of his life is a painful lesson that living a good life is far more important than making a good living.