The Question of Being a Good Man

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What I Have Authored Up to This Point

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I was thinking today about authoring the future, and about how uncomfortable it is to admit that I have already authored most of my story. I’ve reached the strange age where I look at people “of age” and wonder how they got there—then I catch myself in the mirror and realize I’m there too.

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At some point, I assume almost everyone looks into their reflection and thinks: who is that old guy staring back at me? And the most unsettling part isn’t the face. It’s the recognition that the story has been underway for a long time.

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And then the next thought arrives: what comes next?

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Not as a motivational question. As a factual one. Because a certain age brings a second realization along with the first—there is an end coming, even if it stays politely out of view most days.

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Whatever I imagine comes next does not begin from a blank page. It begins from accumulated choices: habits reinforced, moments when restraint held, moments when it didn’t. That realization strips away the comfort of abstraction. It makes questions about goodness less theoretical and more personal.

There is a line attributed to Marcus Aurelius that I return to often: “Waste no more time arguing about what a good man should be. Be one.” What strikes me now is not its moral clarity, but its refusal to indulge self-explanation. Marcus wasn’t interested in defining virtue as a concept. He was interested in whether it showed up under pressure, boredom, fear, and power. Goodness, in that sense, is not something you claim. It is something that survives contact with life.

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When I worked as a therapist, people would come in asking for anger management skills, and I would tell them the request confused me. You can’t have “anger management issues,” I’d say, because there is nothing to manage. Anger isn’t the problem. The problem is what you do when you’re angry. If you become a jerk when you’re angry, that’s not an anger problem—it’s a behavior problem.

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And that really is the question that haunts my thoughts—the question that becomes harder, not easier, as time accumulates. Am I just the jerk some people see me as, or am I a good man?

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One of the reasons I found Peter Capaldi’s portrayal of the Doctor in Doctor Who so compelling is that it is not a young man’s morality. This Doctor has already lived through enough consequence to be suspicious of his own certainty. He isn’t intoxicated by intervention anymore. He is keenly aware of asymmetry and time. He knows he will outlive the people he cares about, and that knowledge quietly governs what he allows himself to do.

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His relationship with Clara makes this visible. There is a moment when he tells her, “I’m not your boyfriend,” and if you aren’t paying attention it sounds like a boundary drawn for her benefit. It isn’t. It is a boundary he is installing in himself. He understands that closeness, when paired with power and unequal time, becomes leverage—even when no one intends it to. The asymmetry becomes stark. So he steps back. He lets her live her life.

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Clara, in her own way, tries to pretend the connection isn’t there. She reaches for something more normal—age appropriate, stable, predictable. But even that life becomes entangled with the Doctor’s orbit, because nothing is the same after becoming his companion. The connection alters the people around her too. Others are drawn in and affected by it, and even when everyone tries to treat it like an ordinary relationship, it isn’t. It can’t be. Not with that kind of power and that kind of time.

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So the question returns: Am I a good man? Again and again, he tries to be good by refusing to make himself central. Even the moments of jealousy or competition carry an undertone of something quieter: a recognition of age, time, and limits that can’t be negotiated away. The connection is clear, and it becomes confusing on a multitude of levels.

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That restraint has a cost. It is not warm. It is not romantic in the easy sense. If it has any romance at all, it’s the romance of memory—the “what if,” the life not lived, the story that could have been written differently.

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And eventually, when restraint fails—when his attachment threatens to justify anything at all—he chooses something unprecedented. He forgets.

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Memory, which had always been his teacher, becomes his danger. So he removes it. Not because the pain is unbearable, but because remembering would make him ungovernable. And yet it leaves a hole that cannot be resolved—because forgetting is not the same as undoing.

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That choice answers the question he keeps asking without ever resolving it rhetorically: Am I a good man? It’s a question without a flattened answer. The answer, if there is one, lies not in intent or feeling, but in what he refuses to let himself become.

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This is where agency enters, and where it becomes uncomfortable. Freedom to choose is a curse sometimes. Not having to choose is more comfortable—but when is that available?

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We often talk about agency as freedom, but it may be more honest to think of it as inevitability. Jean-Paul Sartre argued that we are condemned to be free—not because freedom is pleasant, but because there is no escape from authorship. Choosing not to choose is still a choice. Delegating responsibility is still an action. Silence still leaves fingerprints—and sometimes wounds.

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Agency does not mean constraints don’t exist. They do. Lives are shaped by circumstance, history, biology, and luck. But constraints do not remove authorship; they limit the available options. What remains unavoidable is that whatever happens next, we are still the ones living with the consequences.

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We can blame the consequences, or we can recall our part in authoring the life we’re standing in.

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This is why righteous intent is such a temptation. We are quick to absolve ourselves because we meant well, and just as quick to deny that charity to others. Intent becomes forgiveness when it is ours and irrelevant when it is not. But intent does not restrain power. Principles do. Habits do. Structures do.

It is also why Friedrich Nietzsche remains relevant here, even unresolved. Nietzsche removed external moral guarantees and forced the burden of creation inward. His idea of the Übermensch is often misunderstood as license. It is better read as weight. What happens when there is no authority left to appeal to? Who restrains the strong when nothing external can?

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Nietzsche never finished that answer. Perhaps he couldn’t. Perhaps it should not be finished. What becomes clear, however, is that strength without restraint does not transcend morality—it collapses into something more primitive. Power does not eliminate the need for limits. It makes them more urgent.

Which brings me back to where I started.

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The question is not whether I am a good man in the abstract. The question is whether the principles I claim to live by actually restrain me when they should. Whether I acknowledge the limits of my own judgment. Whether I accept that my life, as it exists now, is already authored—and that whatever comes next will be written by the same hand.

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Marcus was right. There is little value in arguing endlessly about goodness. But there is great cost in discovering, too late, that we never built the restraints goodness requires.

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And so the question remains, unanswered on purpose: not what is a good man—but whether I am living in a way that allows the question to matter at all.