Piper Curda

COMM 494

26 November 2018

Communication and the Good Life

The communication principles or practices considered as crucial to living the good life

depend on how “the good life” is defined. This idea of the good life is one I never gave much

thought to, if at all, before I came to Wheaton. While certain facets of my personal view of the

good life have changed or developed over the last few years, the central theme has remained the

same: contentment. I believe the good life is marked by an all-encompassing contentment and

one should employ communication practices of empathy, compassion, and forgiveness within his

or her communities in order to foster the good life. Furthermore, I believe that without these

communication practices, the good life cannot be achieved at all.

In the same way that communication is impossible without other people, I believe the

good life is impossible without community with others. Vorderer (2016) echoes this by

describing three key human aspirations related to his idea of the good life, one of which is “our

need to be with others, to be related, to belong to somebody, to not be alone, and to not be

excluded” (p. 3). The good life is not attainable alone. We need community and we need

communication. However, I don’t think just any kind of communication will do.

Mackenzie (2016) defines contentment as “a fulfilling relationship with the self and

society” (p. 252). She further clarifies that contentment is not simply settling for the way things

are, but rather it is the “understanding of social circumstance that permits individuals to grasp the

context of their emotional experiences, and to find fulfillment in that relationship” (p. 253). In

order to properly cultivate this relationship, I believe our communication practices should
involve nurturing the relationships we have with those around us. One way to do this is to

practice empathy.

Empathy is the ability to feel what another person is feeling or at least attempt to

understand what it is like. Employing empathy is crucial to the good life because if we are unable

to understand the experiences of the people around us, we are, in turn, unable to fully

comprehend our own experiences given we learn through those around us and integrate their

knowledge into our own knowledge. To “understand our social circumstances” (Mackenzie,

2016, p. 253) requires we understand one another or, at the very least, try to. Baxter and Akkoor

(2008) express a similar sentiment in saying that conscious communication is about “a mutual

process of authoring” (p. 27); the advantage of this authoring lies in that “each person has a

unique perspective, always outside another’s perspective” (p. 26).

The good life also requires compassion. Compassion is, in some sense, a narrower

application of empathy. It is the understanding of another person’s pain and the desire to

alleviate it. Baxter and Akkoor (2008) describe how we should strive to demonstrate an

“answerability characterized by an all-encompassing attention to the whole of an Other” (p. 28).

Attending specifically to the whole of an Other means all aspects of them: the good, the bad, and

the ugly. We not only need to be able to understand and make sense of each other’s positive

experiences, but their negative ones as well. Additionally, we need to make sure that we continue

to author Others by helping them reconcile with their pain or sorrow, not simply acknowledge it.

This effort toward compassion must also manifest itself in another communication

practice: forgiveness. Forgiveness, in my opinion, is best understood as the absence of anger

towards someone, even if it may be warranted. Being angry with someone or not offering

forgiveness evolves into resentment, which does anything but breed contentment. Not only does
resentment foster negative feelings in the one withholding forgiveness, but it begins to develop

in the person it is being withheld from as well. Practicing forgiveness can help resolve the

differences one encounters in mutual authoring of an Other. While it may not immediately seem

to be the most desirable option, Mackenzie (2016) argues that “contentment involves work and

leisure, pleasure and pain, reward and sacrifice” (p. 254). In other words, working towards

contentment will not always be easy or pleasant, but this is what it takes to achieve the good life.

One of the key components of the good life is the right kind of communication. This does

not mean, however, that this communication will always be pleasant. It can take hard work to

practice empathy or to convey compassion, and we might feel every urge to do anything other

than practice forgiveness. However, if the good life were easy to attain then would it really be

the good life? Doing good deeds or donating money to charity does not make God love us more,

but we should still seek to do good for the sake of being a decent person. In the same way,

though effortful, communication can be challenging; it must be this way in order to reap the

rewards. We need to understand the feelings of each other, seek to alleviate each other’s pain,

and do what we can to not contribute to it. We spend our entire lives being ourselves and it can

be difficult to think about the lives of others, but this is exactly what it takes for our

communication to contribute to our living of the good life.

 References

Baxter, A. L., & Akkoor, C. (2008). Aesthetic love and romantic love in close relationships. In

Roberts, K. G. & Arnett, R. C. (Eds.), Communication ethics: Between cosmopolitanism

and provinciality (23-46). Peter Lang Publishing.

Mckenzie, J. (2015). Happiness vs contentment? A case for a sociology of the good life. Journal

for the Theory of Social Behavior, 46(3), 252-267.

Vorderer, P. (2016). Communication and the good life: Why and how our discipline should make

a difference. Journal of Communication, 66, 1-12.