To live well (the breadth of interpretability there is intentional), to live with some compassion, as well as passion. This is, at least in part, my version of the point of living.
That compassion part of it, however, doesn’t strike everyone as to the point, or even necessary. Caring for others, or even simply ‘being good’, isn’t very interesting.
Mark Vernon recently wrote on the idea of the ‘goody two shoes’ (as opposed to a more benignly-looked upon, yet still unfashionable, goodness):
‘I’ve been wondering why it’s so hard for us to talk about the notion of a good person. It fails to appeal, with its overtones of one who obeys the rules – worse, who habitually obeys the rules because they have a cloying, compliant character.
‘I think that’s a clue to the problem: we’ve become so used to thinking about morality as being about obeying rules, doing the right thing, that we’ve lost sight of a more appealing notion of goodness.’
