What being a good person means to me

The core of it

If I strip my life down to its core, I think what I really want is pretty simple:

I want to be happy and at peace with the kind of person I am.

Not happy as in “everything is fun all the time,” but the quieter kind—where I can lie in bed at night and feel like I’m living in a way that actually makes sense to my deepest self.

What didn’t work (for long)

For a long time, I thought that feeling would come from getting things right on the outside. More freedom. More money. More travel. A job I loved. The “right” relationship. A sense that I was doing better than average.

Some of that did help, at least for a while. New experiences are fun. Having more choices is nice. But none of those things ever felt like the answer. They were more like upgrades to the environment, while something much deeper remained unresolved.

A different question

So I started sitting with a different question:

If all the external stuff went away, what would make me feel like a good person?

Not in a moralistic way, not like a checklist of virtues, but in a “could I look my future self in the eye?” kind of way.

The more I’ve thought about it, the more I’ve come back to this:

Alignment (and returning when I drift)

For me, a good life—and being a good person—has a lot to do with living in alignment with my deepest self, and having the discipline to keep coming back to that alignment when I drift.

“Discipline” is a loaded word, because we usually picture something like: never missing a workout, working late every night, waking up at 4:30 a.m. forever. But that kind of discipline can still be completely ego-driven. It can be another way of chasing status, or building an identity that looks admirable from the outside while ignoring what’s happening inside.

The kind of discipline I’m talking about feels different. It’s more like the ability to pause and ask:

“What is the next right thing according to the part of me I trust the most?”

—and then actually doing that, even when it’s not the easiest or most comfortable option.

The next right thing (usually ordinary)

Sometimes that “next right thing” is big and dramatic, but most of the time it’s painfully ordinary. It’s being honest in a conversation where it would be easier to dodge. It’s apologizing when I know I’ve been unfair. It’s choosing to rest instead of escaping into a blur of scrolling and substances. It’s doing something kind for someone else when no one will ever know.

I don’t think “finding yourself” is a single moment where you realize, Oh, I was meant to be an astronaut or I’m actually supposed to be a painter. It’s not a dramatic plot twist.

It feels more like a way of walking.

The difference you can’t see from the outside

Two people can both become lawyers. One is driven mostly by money and status and winning. The other genuinely cares about fairness, about helping people who can’t help themselves, about making the system a little less cruel. From the outside they look similar, but internally they’re living very different lives. One might be following comparison and insecurity; the other might actually be listening to something deeper.

Most of the goals that sound impressive when you say them out loud—“become the next big tech CEO,” “win at all costs,” “be the most successful person I know”—feel, to me, like they’re built on layers of comparison. They’re loud. They’re fueled by other people’s eyes. They’re not wrong in themselves, but when I really sit still, they don’t feel like my deepest values. They feel like the noise around my values.

People who seem at peace

Over the past few years, I’ve tried to find people who seem genuinely at peace and pay attention to how they live.

At a ten-day Vipassana retreat, I met volunteers who had quietly offered their homes to strangers for weeks—like the woman who let a couple move in so the husband, who was dying, could be cared for there. No payment. No PR. Just… giving.

At church with my wife, I see people who show up early every week to set things up, cook, clean, listen to others, and go home without posting any of it. I think about those young Mormon missionaries who knock on doors, fully committed to what they believe, even when people are rude or dismissive. Whether or not I agree with every piece of theology, I can’t ignore the conviction and generosity.

When I read people like Sartre or Anthony de Mello, or listen to folks like Naval, I keep noticing similar themes hiding under different words: pay attention to your mind, don’t get lost in chasing illusions, understand what you truly care about, and then live in line with that—even when it cuts against what the world celebrates.

There’s a quiet strength in people who live this way. They’re not perfect. They still struggle. But there’s a solidity there that feels very different from the anxious, achievement-driven energy I see in myself when I’m deep in comparison mode.

Stillness, honesty, discipline

So when I ask, “what does it mean to be a good person?” for myself, it keeps coming back to something like this:

I need enough stillness and honesty to actually hear my deepest self. Not the part rehearsing arguments, not the part obsessing over what others think, but the part that cares about kindness, truth, and long-term integrity.

I need enough discipline and courage to follow that voice more often than I ignore it. Especially in the small, boring, private decisions that no one else will ever see.

The tiny voice

On a Friday night, when I’m wiped from the week, a part of me wants to just escape—take an edible, scroll endlessly, numb out. And there’s usually a tiny part of me, under all of that, that knows: This probably isn’t actually going to make tomorrow better. This is me trying not to feel something.

That tiny voice is easy to ignore, but it’s also the one I trust the most. When I practice listening to it and acting from it—even just slightly more often—I feel better about who I am. Not instantly euphoric. Just steadier, more grounded, more myself.

The hard part is that almost everything in the way we live now is designed to pull us in the opposite direction. The phone is always within reach. Work bleeds into every corner of the day. There’s always something new to compare myself to. It’s rare to be truly bored, and boredom is often where the real questions start leaking through.

I’ve noticed that I’m a much better version of myself when I make it harder to constantly escape: when I leave my phone in another room, when I go for a walk without headphones, when I sit in silence for a bit even though my mind would rather be anywhere else. None of that makes me “good” on its own, but it creates the space where I can at least hear what being good would look like in the next five minutes.

A working definition

I don’t think I’ll ever have a clean, final definition of what it means to be a good person. But right now, for me, it feels like this:

Trying, over and over again, to live in a way that my deepest self would be proud of—
not the self that wants to win or impress,
but the self that is okay with giving more than it gets,
telling the truth even when it’s awkward,
and choosing the quieter, kinder option when no one is keeping score.

Some days I do that well. Other days I miss the mark completely. But the direction feels right.

And I’ve started to notice that the days where I get this even partly right—the days where my actions line up with what I know is good—those are the days where “happiness” doesn’t feel like something I have to chase. It’s just there, underneath everything else, like a quiet yes.

That, to me, is what being a good person is starting to mean.