What Does a Good Digital Life Look Like?

An ethical framework for accelerating change

Imagine a precocious thirteen-year-old girl comes to you for advice. She wants to know what she should do to live a “good life” in the face of digital technology. What would you tell her? 

You can’t just tell her to stay off smartphones and avoid social media. This type of answer ignores the lived reality of the digital native. Her life is immersed in digital technology. Her entire social life is mediated through her phone. All of her friends are on social media. Any definition of a good digital life must account for some minimum digital engagement.

Surely you could offer plenty of sound advice based on your personal experience. But how much of that experience would still make sense to her? What are the values you could reference that have a clear digital equivalent? Who are the role models you could point to? 

In trying to explain values and behaviors that might help her, you realize that a lot of translation is necessary to apply them to her digital reality. Sometimes this works, but sometimes she just looks confused. You begin to realize that much of what you thought constituted a good life has changed. It’s almost as if a contextual chasm has formed between her life and yours that makes it difficult to transfer much of your wisdom.

Is it any wonder that digital natives seem to be struggling so much to adapt to their new digital landscape? How much of this can be explained by the previous generation lacking any real “digital wisdom” to impart? How can we expect them to live good digital lives when so little of the advice on offer is relevant to their digital reality?

How to define a good life

For almost all of human history, any child would have had no problems answering this question. They would have been born into a culture that began etching a moral blueprint into their psyche from day one. Everything in that child’s life would have constantly reinforced the values and behaviors that defined a good life.

Part of this education would have included moral habituation—drilling into the child the exact behaviors of right and wrong that were required to achieve a good life. And part of that habituation would have included the valorization of moral exemplars—the community leaders, ancestors, and mythical figures that personified the specific traits and virtues that embodied the good life.

This type of moral education depended on contexts between generations remaining largely the same. If a culture is stable across time, then each generation can assure the next that they’ve “seen it all before”. They can point to the hard-won lessons from the past as being just as relevant today as they ever were. They can tell stories of ancient ancestors living lives that look essentially the same as those in the present day.

But once cultural contexts start changing, the efficiency of this entire ethical framework begins to shift. The question then becomes: is there a rate of change where it begins to break down completely? 

What does the rate of cultural change say about that culture’s capacity to transfer wisdom across generations? And what does that say about the capacity of our current ethical frameworks to survive our technological future?

We can better analyze these questions by seeing how increasing rates of cultural change relate to the transmission of values and wisdom across generations.

Stage 1: Meta-generational

For most of human civilization, beliefs and values remained constant across generations. An extremely slow rate of cultural change was our historical norm. Any definition of a good life could apply to every generation.

When the rate of change is barely discernible then values can become deeply embedded in specific cultural contexts. Stories and myths convey precisely how to values should be embodied. Specific rituals provide scripts for exactly how certain lives should be lived. There is almost zero room to deviate from whatever “good life” is assigned for you at birth.

This method worked for almost all of human history. It’s exactly what Aristotle outlined in his study of virtue ethics, and some version of it has been constant across all historic cultures. Of course these lives could be fragile to disruption, but as long as cultures remained stable, rich definitions of good lives could be sustained across generations. 

Stage 2: Multi-generational

No culture is ever perfectly frozen in time. Even the most conservative societies are experiencing a constant rate of change. This is almost always a good thing—moral progress depends on culture changing enough to loosen its hold on the imagination of what’s possible.

Typically change isn’t significant enough to disrupt a society. But wars, politics, and religion always have the potential to change culture enough to create friction across generations. The best ethical frameworks can overcome this friction by anticipating some degree of change and incorporating it into the wisdom of the next generations.

Elders play a crucial role in this process, serving as a bridge between the past and present. They can help younger generations understand the core principles behind traditional values, while guiding them in adapting these principles to new contexts. This approach allows cultural norms to gradually evolve across generations without completely severing ties to the past. 

Stage 3: Inter-generational

Sometimes change is so abrupt that a contextual chasm can open between generations. Contexts can shift so abruptly that traditional ideas of a good life no longer apply—not because they are no longer true, but because the context in which those lives were possible no longer exists. 

When contexts change this quickly, transferring values across generations becomes almost impossible. The next generation sees the wisdom of previous generations as something to rebel against, not something to venerate.

This is how cultures can transform in a single generation, often accompanied by social violence and political upheaval. The results are entirely new definitions of what a good life should be. Recent examples include Europe during the first World War, America in the 1960s, and China during the Cultural Revolution.

It’s also happening today, in the generational divide of the digital revolution. Grandparents today arguably have more in common with grandparents from hundreds of years ago than they do with their own grandchildren. Whatever a parent today thinks might have helped them navigate adolescence would have almost no relevance with their own children. 

If this digital divide is an indication, then our practices for transferring wisdom across generations may no longer be sufficient for the current pace of technological disruption.

The new normal

There’s a final stage for how fast contexts can change: Intra-generational change. 

This is when change happens so quickly that it doesn’t just create friction between generations, it creates friction during a single lifetime.  Values that might have been relevant at one point of your life may not apply at others. Lessons you were taught in childhood may no longer make sense. Just when you thought you had figured out some hard-earned wisdom, that entire environment changes on you.

With sufficient technological disruption, a chasm can also open up between those that adopt certain technologies and those that don’t. You can see this already developing with AI, where some teens are admitting to becoming addicted to interacting with AI characters. Soon the first generation of “AI natives” will be growing up interacting directly with AI agents. They’ll feel closer to their AI nannies than with anyone in their family, just like many digital natives feel like their “true self” only when they are online.

When disruptive technology moves faster than any single generation’s ability to adapt to it, then any generational transfer of values becomes impossible. It will only get harder and harder to define what constitutes a good life when the possibility of that life is changing before our very eyes. 

Will intra-generational change be the new norm? It’s possible that digital represents a one-time event, and somehow we’ll return to some equilibrium of stable cultural change. But this would be a radical inversion of today’s technological trends. Digital itself continues to evolve, and we’re just starting on similar trajectories of disruption with AI, robotics, bio-engineering, and a whole host of other technologies that will radically reshape our world.

Soon we may be confronting a reality where the only constant will be change itself. 

A new ethics of change

If accelerating change is our new normal, then we’ll need to fundamentally rethink our approach to ethics, wisdom, and the pursuit of a good life. But how?

It starts by accepting the reality of change itself. Change is not something we must fear by definition. Adapting to increasing rates of change is something we have evolved to excel at. After all, we’re currently living through rates of change that somehow feels “normal”, yet would appear utterly frightening to anyone living two-hundred years ago. Tomorrow’s rate of change will feel similarly frightening to us, yet we will continue to adapt.

Once we accept accelerating change, we can then consider new ethical frameworks that can be more resilient to rapid contextual shifts. The following are some approaches that might inform these new frameworks:

1. Abstracting core values: Instead of focusing on values and behaviors that are anchored in specific contexts, we need to identify and cultivate more universal human values that can adapt to changing circumstances.

2. Venerating adaptability: The ability to navigate change itself should be recognized as a crucial virtue in our rapidly evolving world.

3. Developing ethical flexibility: We must teach the skills of ethical reasoning and decision-making from first principles, rather than relying solely on fixed moral rules and lessons.

4. Embracing technological awareness: Understanding the essence of technology and its impact on the human condition must become a core component of moral education.

5. Fostering intergenerational dialogue: We need to restore meaningful exchange between generations, allowing for mutual learning that can transcend context.

Reimagining what it means to live a good life doesn't have to mean abandoning all traditional values or succumbing to moral relativism. But it will demand that we uncover the core principles that have guided human flourishing throughout history, and that we develop new practices for applying these principles in rapidly changing contexts. Our ideas about wisdom, moral education, and role models will need to become much more dynamic.

For the thirteen-year-old girl seeking advice on how to live a good digital life, our answer might sound something like this: 

Cultivate the wisdom to discern what truly matters amidst the noise of constant innovation. Develop the flexibility to adapt your values to new contexts without losing sight of your core principles. And above all, recognize that the pursuit of a good life is not about achieving some fixed ideal, but about being true to your ideals at each step of your journey—whatever that journey may look like.

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This post is the second in a series exploring our new digital reality. The first post explored the philosopher Martin Heidegger and his approach to understanding the essence of technology.