I recently came up against a moral quandary. The moral quandary is of the sort of that of a parent. Where lies the boundary of my influence on other beings’ lives? What does it mean to be a good cat?

I have two cats: Tofu and Miso. I love my cats. Not to belabor the point – for two years while I was working from home we spent every day together. I’ve had a recent change of jobs, and I now work in an office full-time. With this change, we spend considerably less time together, and I fear they’re bored. I want my cats to have rich and full lives: full of naps made good from exhausting play and food that tastes good from the hunger of fighting. In researching ways to enrich my cats, I came across so-called “scavenge feeders”. The idea is that the cat has to find these little mice full of kibble and beat it out of them instead of having a proverbial bag of potato chips to snack on all day.

I have purchased and deployed these. Though, it seems odd to restrict another being’s access to food so they’ll conform to what I think their life should look like. Of course, they are cats, so I have some responsibility to govern them. However, what if they were my friends or my human children? How does one exercise a good amount of control over another being such that the other being still gets to have a fulfilling existence?

Well, what does it even mean to live a full life? I think an easy thing to reach for is the hedonistic answer: pleasure max the animal life with food, play, and comfort. But would such a thing make us humans happy? In talks of fulfillment, Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs is a common thing to reach for. The classical problem with Maslow’s Hierarchy of needs is that it is set up in a way where one layer precludes the others. Hunger gates love; Love gates aesthetic pursuit. I think life is less linear than that. When I live a fully-sated life, with no needs or wants, I feel less human; like I’m just drifting. At times to the degree that I find myself looking for things like cold showers or long runs.

In these times (in the wide and narrow sense), accomplishment can be lacking in daily life. A job is required to survive but fulfillment through it isn’t. You have to eat but it doesn’t have to nourish you. With utilitarianism informing the content production strategies around us, it’s pretty easy for the media to be similarly lacking in nourishment. So, if filling your day with things that maintain your position in the system and keep you temporarily happy leaves you hollowed out, what should you do?

In short, I don’t know: for me – much less you. But, I think what I do know is that there is joy in the pursuit of stuff. What is stuff? Again, I don’t know, but all the stuff makes up a good life. And I think that you and I know the good stuff.

I think the question of what does it mean to live a good life is entwined with what it means to live a true life, to live resonantly with your nature. Human individuals couldn’t evolve fast enough to keep up with the rate the collective of them could change the world. So many of us don’t know what to do now that the “community” that we have is simultaneously wiped out and orders of magnitude bigger than we can understand. We (nearly) never need to worry about bears or tigers hunting us, but many of us are stalked day and night by mountains of debt. But we can (thankfully) look at this and try to understand why it is discordant and react appropriately.

If I have anything to entreat upon you, it is that. We know the discordances in our lives. Like an instrument out of tune, it is always there in the sound – whether or not you can find it. So, it is incumbent upon everyone to not only find but understand and solve (or at least work at) these things in life. In some way I think that is the stuff.

Moreover, I want Tofu and Miso to have happy and comfortable lives, but I want them to have the joy of being a cat like I have the joy of being a human. As some considered thought is required to figure out what it means to be a good human and then good person. By the same sword, I think that takes a bit of a considered thought as to what it means to be a cat or maybe even a good cat. Listening to your nature and living accordingly – I think struggle is good. So, I really think that the cats having a little hunting to do will make them fill more fulfilled – even if in a contrived way.