What I’m Listening to: Scriptnotes, Episode 532 - Defining the Good Life
With apologies to former President Bill Clinton, “It depends on what the meaning of the word ‘good’ is.”
I have long listened to Scriptnotes, “a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters,” even though I don’t yet write screenplays. (Never say never.) As an actor/movie buff, I love hearing directly from two screenwriters. As a writer, I find insights that apply quite neatly to book writing. And as a person, well. Episode 532 was for me.
In this episode, entitled “Mistakes of Yes,” hosts John August and Craig Mazin speak about times they’ve said yes when they shouldn’t have, for all sorts of reasons, ego among them. And I related to that. But it was their discussion of struggle I needed to hear most.
First, from Craig:
“Unlimited happiness, essentially frictionless life, will kill you. The organism is designed to struggle. One of the tenets of the life, one of the ways they know something is alive is that it’s irritable, it reacts to its surroundings and struggles against them. We need some kind of struggle to feel purpose. Purpose. If we don’t have purpose, we start to fall apart. Why? I don’t know. It doesn’t matter. That’s just a fact. We need to push against something. We as humans are designed to manipulate and change our environment, to fix, improve, all that implies struggle. And struggle implies suffering.” – Craig Mazin
Craig’s 25/25/50 ratio also spoke to me:
“Things should be awful some of the time. If 25% of the time you feel tortured, 25% of the time you feel elated, and 50% of the time you’re in a kind of neutral spot where you’re getting stuff done, that’s about right.” – Craig Mazin
John August weighed in (as he often does), with a measured, diplomatic observation:
“The difference between short-term happiness and long-term satisfaction with what you’re doing is the acknowledgement that the work you’re doing to build that satisfying career is hard and unpleasant and not joyful at times. But it feels meaningful…You’re making choices that are generally not the easiest, best choices in the moment, but are the best choices for a future version of you.” – John August
Taking on the question of what makes a good life, August and Mazin draw on the work of psychologist Paul Bloom, author of The Sweet Spot: The Pleasures of Suffering and the Search for Meaning. After two years of more suffering than we could imagine, individually and collectively, rethinking my idea of the good life from a frictionless existence to one whose very difficulty can lead to greater experiences of pleasure, mastery of difficult skills and flow felt right to me.
Not bad for a podcast on screenwriting.
Related Content
A Good Life is Painful: Podcast interview with psychologist Paul Bloom, including this gem on the linguistic limitations of adjectives that describe a good life: “The vocabulary here is dreadful. People use the terms in different ways. And then they appear to be agreeing when they aren’t and disagreeing when they are. It causes a mess."
Why Kids (And Adults) Need Struggle Stories: Long before the pandemic, this blog post touched on stories of effort and failure and the science behind why reading them helps us achieve more.
