The good lives you never see

Take a moment to picture what success looks like to you.

A person, an outcome, a life you've watched from a distance and quietly decided you want.

Now ask where that picture came from.

For most of us, it's a scroll. Someone we've never met, doing something we admire, appearing again and again until it stopped looking like one example and started looking like the answer.

The pull is real. You do want the thing you're picturing. But there's a problem with how the picture got built.

How a picture becomes a rule

There's an old theory of how we acquire knowledge called induction. It's the process of observing repeated instances of an event, then drawing a general rule from them. For example, every swan you've seen is white, so you conclude all swans are white.

Why is this relevant to you? You may be unknowingly applying induction to arrive at what a good life looks like. See enough people build a loud, visible kind of life, watch it get applauded enough times, and it stops registering as one path among many. It starts to feel like the whole answer.

But induction has a fundamental flaw.

In the 18th century, philosopher David Hume pointed out that no amount of past observations can logically guarantee the future. The sun has risen every day in recorded history, but that's no proof it rises tomorrow. Assuming it will is circular reasoning, as you're assuming the future resembles the past because so far, it has.

Swap sunrises and swans for good lives and you fall into a similar trap. The successful people you've seen are not the whole population of successful people, any more than the swans on a single pond are the whole population of swans, and no number of white ones tells you a black one doesn't exist somewhere you haven't looked.

What shows up on your feed isn't a balanced view of every possible version of a good life. It's a biased subset of a specific kind of life, the kind with a reason to be shown to you.

Two things are missing from it.

What your feed leaves out

The first is almost everyone living well without making a show of it.

Nobody photographs the ordinary Tuesday at home where nothing needed proving.

Take the colleague who turned down the promotion and never once regretted it. Or the couple who never travel anywhere worth an album but genuinely enjoy each other's company at home. Neither is hiding a secret. They just have no reason to broadcast a life that already feels like enough.

The second is the hidden side of the outcomes you do see. What gets shown is the result. What doesn't is what it costs to get there, or what it costs to hold onto once you're there. Lost privacy. Constant scrutiny. The fear of losing a reputation once you have one worth losing.

"You compare yourself to your peers through a curated highlight reel of their lives, where positives are embellished and negatives are hidden from view." — Morgan Housel

A borrowed definition

Putting these pieces together, you realise your definition of success may just be a rule you induced from what you were repeatedly shown, rather than something you reasoned your way to. As a result, most people are working toward goals they inherited rather than chose.

Hume showed induction can never prove a rule true, no matter how many confirming examples pile up. Philosopher Karl Popper then introduced the idea of falsifiability. A single black swan is enough to disprove the claim that all swans are white, no matter how many white ones came before it.

The colleague. The couple. Those are your black swans. They falsify your borrowed definition of a good life, easy to miss only because you weren't looking for them.

So if we can’t rely on induction, what’s a better alternative?

Popper's answer was Critical Rationalism, an entirely different theory of knowledge. In Critical Rationalism, knowledge doesn't grow by accumulating observations until a rule appears. It grows through conjectures and refutations. Propose a tentative theory, test it against the world to find where it breaks, then refine it through error-correction. That's a fundamentally different process from the one that quietly handed you your idea of a good life.

Choosing with the full picture

None of this means the loud, visible version of success is wrong to want. It doesn't mean you should trade your ambitions for a smaller, quieter life instead. It just means it was never the only possibility.

This is where Popper's method stops being philosophy and starts being useful. You are free to conjecture, test, and revise your life goals as you learn more, rather than accept whatever rule you happened to inherit.

So test it. Go looking, deliberately, for the versions of a good life that never make anyone's feed. Ask what a life you admire actually costs to live, and whether that tradeoff is worth it to you.

You might find that a quiet, ordinary life is a blessing, not a failure. And if so, you are closer to your version of a good life than the picture in your head led you to believe.

Or you might still want the visible version. Either way, it will be a goal you chose, tested, and iterated on, rather than one you never got around to questioning.