What is a Good Life? | What 300 Conversations Revealed About a Life Well Lived

In the organizer's words:

Overview

⏱️Schedule: Doors 18:30 → Talk 19:00→ Q&A → Mingle
🗣️Language: English

What is a good life?

It's the oldest question we keep forgetting to ask. Philosophers, religions, and thinkers have grappled with it for millennia-yet it rarely comes up in day-to-day conversation. We talk about career goals, fitness targets, bucket lists. But when was the last time you sat down and genuinely asked yourself: what would make this life feel well-lived?

This isn't a lecture. It's an inquiry-one that Mark McCartney has been conducting for five years, with hundreds of people, across cultures and contexts. What began as private interviews has grown into a podcast, a newsletter, a book in progress, and now this session with you.

What we'll cover:

• Patterns from 300+ conversations: What keeps emerging when people describe a life well lived? Themes like presence, connection, and-surprisingly-adversity show up again and again.
• Real stories, not theory: Drawing on his own life and the candid reflections of his podcast guests, Mark shares the kind of genuine human anecdotes that don't make it into self-help books.
• A question worth sitting with: At several points in the evening, you'll be invited to reflect on your own life-what fulfillment has felt like, what gets in the way of it, and what a good life might look like for you now.
• Collective meaning-making: This is a participatory session. Through small group conversations and wider discussion, the audience becomes part of the inquiry. Expect moments of genuine connection, recognition-and the occasional laugh.

Speaker

Mark McCartney

Mark McCartney is a facilitator, writer, and host of the "What is a Good Life?" podcast. For five years, he's been exploring this question with hundreds of people. Before that, he spent over a decade in international finance-until his curiosity grew into something more fundamental: what do we actually find meaningful, and what really matters to us?