Why live the “Examined Life?”

Socrates famously noted, “The unexamined life is not worth living” which can also be called the sleepwalked or unconscious life. But why is it better to live the examined life instead of the unexamined life? Continually evaluating our lives and questioning how we’re living seems potentially fraught with problems. Aren’t we always going to find fault with our lives? What if we don’t like what we see but we can’t do anything about it? Isn’t it better just to focus on living our daily lives and being happy?

For some people the unexamined life may work out fine but I believe that we should live the examined life and always be questioning our lives. If we don’t examine our lives, we may inadvertently live the life that we don’t really want to live. We may spend our life pursuing things that in the end really don’t matter to us, in jobs that we don’t enjoy or relationships that aren’t what we want. We may drift through life without thinking too much about how we are living and not paying attention to the passage of time as we get older. But time does pass for all of us and eventually we will wake up one day realizing that we’re no longer a young person and that our choices are now more limited. We may put off aspirations waiting until the day we retire, such as travel but when we finally do retire, we no longer have the good health we need to travel. Examining our lives and living consciously help us avoid this possibility so that we freely choose our lives.

The ability to question our lives is also a part of what makes us human. We are conscious beings, conscious of our thoughts and the world around us. To not question our lives is to deny that humanity, to deny what makes us really human. But there is a price to be paid for living the examined life. It is not easy as all of us go through the ebbs and flows of life. Some of our dreams will be fulfilled while others will not be. We will have our good times and our bad. This is the human condition. But as long as we live the examined life, at least it will be our life, the one we consciously choose and not one that we sleepwalk through.