The Pain of Achieving the Good Life

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The cost of the good life is personal as displayed in Akira Kurosawa's Village of the Watermills, Martin Luther King's "Letter from a Birmingham jail", and Dr. Colburn's common lecture Rosewood. The cost of the good life is the sacrifice of some sense of security with each personal choice we make and each action we take to acquire the good life.
It seems that in America we are blessed with continuously evolving innovation that provides us with so many conveniences. However, it is these conveniences that deter us from the good life by clouding our sense of purpose in life. Once we discover the power of money, many of our goals and purposes in life are driven by the desire to attain money in an attempt to live a luxurious lifestyle. In Akira Kurosawa's Village of Watermills we see that this lifestyle does not guarantee happiness. The old man in the Watermill scene says that, "People get used to convenience. They think convenience is better. They throw out what is truly good." In the film, what is truly good are the things we take for granted; the things that mankind cannot dare to survive without, nature. It only makes sense that in order to attain the good life we should choose to establish a closer relationship with what we actually need to survive. The film acknowledges that our way of life is unnatural and this causes us to form a misconception of the good life. Our idea of the good life is an illusion and how could we ever acquire something that is just an illusion? The old man from the village also says that he wouldn't like a night that is so bright that he could not see the stars. This quote describes the overall mentality we should have toward life in today's society because it is important that people don't becom...

... middle of paper ...

... the risk of possible punishment or even total disregard by the government. However in the end, they were risks well worth.
The good life is something everybody has to work for if they want to attain it. It does not come without effort. The cost of the good life are all the trade-offs and sacrifices we give up by making choices for the greater good. It is giving up the things that make us feel secure and that make living life feel easier. It involves choices that will allow us to learn how to understand the world and form a closer relationship with the natural world. Moreover, It involves choices to take risk as well as action in order pave way to the good life.

Works Cited

Colburn, David. Rosewood. Video accessed on Oct. 16 2013.
King, Martin Luther. Letter from a Birmingham Jail. April 16, 1963.
Kurosawa, Akira. “Village of the Watermills” from Dreams. 1990

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