“Good living” means one of two things. For some, it means having a comfortable life, with the means to have a high standard of living. It may also mean having a moral and ethical life. “Good living” also signifies a simple, healthy, morally decent, often environmentally conscious way of life in British English. The phrase “good life” dates back to 1543, as per Merriam-Webster.
Here’s the mix-up that proves the point. When people say they make a good living, they usually mean they earn a good income. People who say they live the good life usually mean that they live a comfortable life. When people say they support good living, they may mean neither of the other two — they may mean brown rice, cycling to work and a clear conscience. Same three words, three different objects.
What does good living actually mean?
In traditional terms, “good living” may mean having a comfortable life, with luxury and few cares. It may mean a high standard of living, as indicated by material possessions. It may also mean living in accordance with the ethical, moral, legal and religious norms of your culture. These are the two senses of the phrase captured in Planet of Success’s explainer on the good life.
The phrase feels slippery because it carries both senses at once, and English speakers almost never flag which one they mean.
The material sense: comfort, luxury and few worries
Merriam-Webster glosses “living the good life” as living like a wealthy person. Collins frames it as comfort and luxury with few worries. “Good living” is largely used in an advertising context, in property listings, or to describe the high life in the world of the rich and famous. This is the sense in La Dolce Vita as cultural shorthand. “Good living” is the sweet life, bought.
The moral sense: living by a code
The second sense says a good life is a well-lived one: an honest and temperate life, and that it is good to be useful to those around you. It is the older idea and the one that the evidence toward the end of this page supports.
One distinction holds the entire thing together. Standard of living is income, goods and comfort, that is, what you can buy. Quality of life is how a life feels and functions. The two meanings are often collapsed. This page separates them.
Which meaning of the good living did you land on? The four senses side by side
To rank for this phrase, pages often focus on one lane: a dictionary definition, philosophy, positive psychology, or a set of healthy habits. None of them helps you determine which of the four meanings you actually had in mind. That’s what this page does, so start here.
The four senses at a glance
| The phrase | What it actually means | Who uses it that way | Source | Read next |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| “Live the good life” | Live like a wealthy person — comfort, luxury, few worries | General English speakers | Merriam-Webster; Collins | Does money buy a good life? |
| “make a good living” | Earn enough money from your work. About income, not about the whole life | Everyday talk about jobs and pay | Cambridge Dictionary — a separate headword entirely | Standard of living versus quality of life |
| “good living” (British usage) | A simple, healthy, morally good, often environmentally conscious way of life | British English; health and sustainability writing | Collins | The daily habits section |
| Sumak Kawsay / buen vivir | Literally “good living” — harmony with community, family and nature | Andean political and ecological thought; two national constitutions | Wikipedia, Sumak kawsay | Buen vivir: harmony, not accumulation |
| “Good Life” as a title or brand | Films, books, albums, songs, TV series, cafés, gyms | People searching for a named work | Wikipedia, Good Life (disambiguation) | The named-works block below |
The biggest mix-up occurs with the second row. People often use “making a good living” and “the good life” interchangeably, and are surprised that achieving their income goal didn’t improve their life. In truth, they are different headwords with different objects. The former is a measure of what your work pays, the latter is a judgment of the entirety of one’s life.
If you came here for a song, a book or a shop
Worth saying outright, because nobody else does: Wikipedia’s “Good Life” page — often the highest-authority result for this phrase — is a pure disambiguation index. It lists four films from 1996 to 2008, seven books, bands, albums, EPs and songs, three TV series, a video game, cafés, record labels and fitness companies. The entry doesn’t touch on the philosophical definition at all: Socrates is not mentioned, and Aristotle appears only as a one-line pointer to eudaimonia.
Routing rule: if you’re looking for a title or a brand, that index is your destination, not this page. A few notes before you go. The book that most people mean when they ask who wrote it is Helen and Scott Nearing’s Living the Good Life, which documents their self-sufficient homesteading project in Vermont, published privately in 1954 and then republished in 1970 by Schocken Books. Steven J. Jensen’s Living the Good Life (CUA Press) is a different book with the same title, and Waldinger and Schulz’s The Good Life (2023) is a third thing again: the Harvard study book.
What is the good life according to Aristotle and eudaimonia?
Eudaimonia is the philosophical term for the highest human good, originally associated with Aristotle. It covers happiness, flourishing, wellbeing and a sense of purpose. The eudaimonic model stresses the importance of virtue and argues for a eudaimonic society made up of virtuous individuals, guided by principles of courage, justice and wisdom, and temperance.
Hedonia versus eudaimonia: feeling good or functioning well
Hedonia is the experience of pleasure and being in a positive mood. Eudaimonia is of functioning well and living a meaningful life. A discussion of this phrase has to include both of them since the first is chased by the material sense, and the second is chased by the moral sense.
Virtue ethics sits among a crowded field of alternatives. Jensen’s Living the Good Life introduces virtue and vice, self-control and weakness, misery and happiness, and sets Aquinas against moral relativism, values clarification, utilitarianism, Kantian deontology and situation ethics.
The key to putting this all into practice is the hinge that everything else turns on: on a virtue account, a good life is something you practise, not something you acquire.
What does positive psychology say makes a life flourish?
In positive psychology, the good life means flourishing: being engaged, feeling positive emotions, having meaningful relationships and experiencing a sense of accomplishment.
The five elements of PERMA
Martin Seligman’s PERMA model, introduced in Flourish (2011), names five. Each of these components contributes independently, thus a strong score in one does not make up for a gap in another. Let’s go over each of them for a minute:
- Positive Emotion — when is the last time you were genuinely glad?
- Engagement — what is it that you lose yourself in?
- Relationships — who would notice if you went quiet for a week?
- Meaning — what is it that you are a part of that is greater than yourself?
- Accomplishment — what are you getting measurably better at?
Think of each of these elements and score yourself on a scale of 1 to 10. Look for the lowest, not the average.
The eight dimensions of living well
COPE Health’s living-well framework expands the same idea into eight dimensions — physical, intellectual, emotional, social, spiritual, vocational, financial and environmental — and if you ignore any of these dimensions, it can affect your overall well-being. The two frameworks overlap rather than compete: PERMA tells you how a life feels from the inside, the eight dimensions tell you which part of it you have been neglecting.
What does the longest study of adult life say predicts a good one?
The Harvard Study of Adult Development is the longest in-depth study of adult physical and mental wellbeing. It began in 1938 with 724 participants — 268 Harvard College sophomores and 456 young adults from Boston.
Its central finding, as Robert Waldinger reports from the study, is blunt: good relationships keep us happier and healthier. Members of the study with more robust social connections showed lower rates of diabetes, arthritis and cognitive decline. In their 2023 book The Good Life, Waldinger and Marc Schulz write that small, consistent investments in relationships compound into life satisfaction.
Loneliness in numbers: the 2025 WHO findings
Most healthy-living pages keep connection soft. The WHO Commission on Social Connection, reporting on 30 June 2025, attaches numbers: 1 in 6 people worldwide are affected by loneliness, and loneliness was associated with more than 871,000 deaths annually over 2014–2019 — roughly 100 deaths every hour.
The WHO has concrete recommendations, too: build social infrastructure — parks, libraries, cafés — and measure progress with a proposed global Social Connection Index. Treat relationship maintenance as a health behaviour with a dose, not a sentiment.
What are the daily habits of the good living — with actual numbers?
Thresholds beat intentions. With a threshold, you know whether you met it for the week. With an intention, you never really know.
Movement, sleep and the thresholds that are published
- Movement: 150 minutes of moderate-intensity activity a week — 30 minutes a day, 5 days a week — plus 2 days of muscle-strengthening work, per the CDC’s Physical Activity Guidelines for Americans.
- Sleep: 7 hours or more for adults aged 18–60. According to CDC NCHS data, 30.5% of US adults averaged less than 7 hours in a 24-hour period in 2024 — the gap between the threshold and the actual number is a good number to know, too.
- Connection: a weekly standing date with a person who matters, per the WHO and Harvard evidence above.
The habits that carry no number — and how to judge them
A balanced diet, hydration, stress management and avoiding harmful substances have no single published threshold you can tick off. Judge them by dimension instead: if the physical and emotional columns of the eight-dimension model are the two you would score lowest, that is where the week’s effort goes.
Does money buy a good life, or does it just buy comfort?
Nobody puts this tension all in one basket. In the dictionary sense, good living means wealthy living: Merriam-Webster defines it as living like the wealthy, Collins as living a life of comfort and luxury with few worries. The long-run evidence points somewhere else. The Harvard study, running since 1938 with 724 participants, lands on relationships rather than standard of living as the predictor of a happy, healthy life.
So if you’re playing for the dictionary definition, you’re playing for something the long-run evidence says isn’t the most important thing.
Standard of living versus quality of life
Money does real work at the bottom of the curve: it removes material insecurity, it buys back time, and it funds the financial dimension of living well. Past security, the returns shift — to meaning, engagement and connection, which money can fund but cannot purchase.
Buen vivir: good living as harmony, not accumulation
The non-Western counterweight is explicit about it. Sumak kawsay — literally “good life” or “good living” — frames the good life as harmony with community, family, nature and the universe rather than accumulation. It was written into Ecuador’s Constitution in 2008, where it is mentioned 25 times including in the prologue, and a slightly different Quechua version into Bolivia’s in 2009. The Nearings’ homesteading project is the Anglophone version of the same instinct: comfort deliberately traded for self-sufficiency.
How do you define good living for yourself without it becoming a non-answer?
I agree that living well is relative, and that is where the competing pages stop. Here is what you can do with it.
Pick the framework that matches your actual problem
- Generally feeling ‘off’ and not engaged → PERMA.
- Feeling isolated → the relationship evidence and the WHO findings.
- General physical decline → the published thresholds.
- Achieving goals but not feeling fulfilled → virtue and eudaimonia.
A 10-minute self-assessment you can run today
- Score PERMA’s five elements from 1 to 10.
- Score the eight dimensions of living well from 1 to 10.
- Name the two lowest in total.
- Come up with one weekly commitment to address each, with a number attached.
- Set a review date 90 days out and re-score — definitions drift, so re-score on a schedule rather than re-deciding daily.
What you really need to be mindful of is the threshold, because a definition with no threshold and no review date is a preference, not a plan. For more like this, explore Content Trail HQ.
Three things to take away
- The phrase splits four ways — a wealthy lifestyle, earning enough from your work, a simple and morally conscious way of life, and buen vivir‘s harmony with community and nature. Check which one you meant before you act on it.
- The concept version has the better evidence. Since 1938, the Harvard Study of Adult Development has said relationships are more important than the standard of living in predicting a healthy, happy life.
- Add numbers. 150 minutes of weekly movement, 7 hours of sleep, one standing contact with a person who matters — then re-take the assessment in 90 days.
People Also Ask
Is “the good living” grammatically correct, or should it be “the good life”?
“The good life” is the idiom, as it is the dictionary headword and it takes the article. “Good living” is standard without an article (“good living and fresh air”), and “make a good living” is standard as a fixed phrase about income. “The good living” with the article generally turns up as a translation of the Andean concept sumak kawsay, or buen vivir, which means literally “good living”. So it is not wrong, but it signals a different sense than most readers expect.
What is the difference between the good life and a good standard of living?
Standard of living measures income, goods and material comfort — what you can afford. The good life is a judgement about the whole life, including how it feels and functions, which is closer to quality of life. The phrase collapses the two judgements, which is why the distinction is important: Merriam-Webster’s gloss of living the good life points at wealth, while the Harvard Study of Adult Development, running since 1938 with 724 participants, points at relationships as the predictor of a happy, healthy life.
Which came first — the philosophical idea of the good life or the phrase itself?
The idea is definitely older than the English phrase. Eudaimonia, the philosophical term for the highest human good, is ancient Greek and is originally associated with Aristotle, who tied it to virtues such as courage, justice, wisdom and temperance. The first known usage of the English phrase “good life” recorded in Merriam-Webster is 1543 — roughly two thousand years later.
Can you live the good life on a low income?
In the material sense of the phrase, no — that sense of the phrase is defined by wealth and comfort. The evidence shifts the picture. The central finding of the study out of Harvard was that good relationships keep us happier and healthier, and Waldinger and Schulz argue that these gains do not take expensive gestures, rather they come from small, consistent investments. The WHO Commission on Social Connection recommends public social infrastructure — parks, libraries, cafés — precisely because connection should not require money. The published health thresholds are also cheap: 150 minutes of moderate activity a week and 7 or more hours of sleep cost nothing to hit.
How long does it take to see a change after improving sleep, exercise and social contact?
None of the sources here provides a specific timeline, so treat any specific promise with suspicion. What the evidence does say is that the relationship gains come from small, consistent investments compounding over time — the Harvard study has been following its participants since 1938. The practical answer is to judge yourself on whether you met the numbers this week, and to re-score your PERMA elements and living-well dimensions 90 days out rather than looking for a change daily.
