Last week, I think I led something of the good life. Why? Because we spent most of the week with good friends and then, over the weekend, my brother and his family. Someone's life cannot be called happy, even if they have every other good thing the world has to offer, unless they have good friends, thought Aristotle. Agreed.

But my good week was characterised by something else too: travel. To see my good friends, I had to travel out of London, to Paris, Edinburgh and Suffolk. This cost me a substantial amount of money - travel costs and then, opportunity costs, which is to say I had to take time off work to do the travel (though being freelance I could do some whilst traveling.) Added together, the total was well in excess of the median weekly wage in the UK.

Now, I don't begrudge that spend for a minute. But the observation has led me to a rather bleak conclusion.

Perhaps it's just the fact that it's a gloomy, wet Monday morning back here in London. But I'm wondering whether spending quality time with friends, the core element of the good life if Aristotle is right, is unsustainable in the modern world. We have to travel to see friends, for modern living separates friends. That travel costs, so we have to earn more to undertake it; but that need to earn is what separates friends in the first place. It seems like a vicious spiral.

It would be an example of something Robert Skidelsky, the chief interpreter of John Maynard Keynes, has spotted. Keynes had thought that in the early decades of the 21st century - about now - most people in the UK would be earning enough money to live the good life. So, they would stop wanting to earn more, and as a result, the economy would stop growing, and would become sustainable. Obviously, there is absolutely no sign that is happening. Quite the opposite. And so what was wrong with Keynes' analysis, asks Skidelsky?

'(In the modern world) the accumulation of wealth, which should be a means to the "good life," becomes an end in itself because it destroys many of the things that make life worth living. Beyond a certain point – which most of the world is still far from having reached – the accumulation of wealth offers only substitute pleasures for the real losses to human relations that it exacts.'

He adds that 'finding the means to nourish the fading "associations or duties or ties" that are so essential for individuals to flourish is the unsolved problem of the developed world.'

That's, perhaps, it. I've simplified things somewhat in my reflection on a good week. However, there's something profound here no less. For without such a solution, I suspect that at a personal level, we'll continue to be caught in this spiral of working harder to earn more to live well - or to use the economic word for the spiral, 'growth'. And so, at a collective level, we won't find the sustainable ways of living that the planet, and the good life, appears to be saying we must have.

(Image: Gregory F. Maxwell)