The Good Life

Course Description

What counts as a good life isn't fixed — it's built differently by every culture and every era. This five-week course takes a comparative approach, exploring how societies around the world and across history have answered one of humanity's oldest questions, and what that reveals about the culture we're each raised in. Over five sessions, Thinkers explore (this is a broad structure, it will be changed to follow Thinkers' interests): Week 1: Individualism vs. collectivism — comparing Western ideas of personal success with collectivist traditions (East Asian, African, Indigenous) that define the good life through community and relationship Week 2: Virtue, duty and purpose — Ancient Greek virtue ethics, Confucian harmony, Ubuntu philosophy, and religious traditions as competing answers to "how should one live?" Week 3: Time, work and rest — how different societies value productivity versus leisure, from hustle culture to Nordic work-life models to subsistence and slow-living traditions Week 4: Status and belonging — how different cultures define respect and social worth, comparing wealth-based status with honour-, age-, or kinship-based systems Week 5: Measuring the good life — comparing GDP with alternative frameworks like Bhutan's Gross National Happiness and the UN's Human Development Index, and asking whether wellbeing can be measured across cultures at all Each week centres on independent research: students bring in a culture, religion, historical period, or philosophy that interests them, and the class builds its comparisons from what they discover. Students will use core sociological tools — culture, values, socialisation, and cross-cultural comparison — to construct and evaluate their own answer to the big question: what makes a good life, and whose definition are we using? Runs: 5 weeks, one session per week