What is a Good Life?

What does a truly good life look like - and how do we find our way back to it?

In this episode of What is a Good Life?, Mark McCartney speaks with Ally Kingston about recovering the capacity for "right relationship": with ourselves, with nature, with community, and with something greater.

Ally is a creative strategist and facilitator, and strategy lead at non-profit Purpose Disruptors and Agency for Nature. She designs interventions to galvanise public imagination and redirect our creative skills to work in harmony with the natural world. Also passionate about holding space for grief and loss in our changing times, she has also trained as a death doula and rites of passage holder. Once an advertising and sustainability leader, and one of Forbes’ 43 People Changing Advertising for the Climate, she writes & lectures on storytelling, imagination and new conceptions of the good life.   

They explore:

- What "right relationship" actually means — and why we've lost it
- Sobriety as a gateway to a fuller life
- The Artist's Way and morning pages as a daily return to self
- What four days alone in a forest teaches you about civilisation
- The imagination crisis - why our vision of the future is shrinking
- Death, grief, and why learning to let things end well matters now more than ever

If you're searching for meaning beyond consumption, or asking what it means to live well in uncertain times, this conversation is for you.

🎙️ What is a Good Life? - conversations that go to the heart of what matters.
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For more from Ally's work:
Purpose Disruptors: https://www.purposedisruptors.org/ally-kingston
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ally-kingston-75922025/

For more from Mark McCartney:
Newsletter: https://www.whatisagood.life/
Website: https://www.mmcleadership.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mark-mccartney-14b0161b4/
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@whatisagoodlife
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/markcmccartney

00:00  How to be in right relationship?
03:45  Two Tomatoes and an Epiphany
08:25  The Word Recovery
09:45  Sobriety and the Paradigm Shift
17:02  Threads Pulling Together
21:24  Morning Pages and the Artist's Way
25:29  Four Days in the Forest
33:24  How Do I Help Things Die?
38:12  Accompanying Her Grandmother
48:30  The Shrinking Imagination
53:04  What is a Good Life?

Tags: good life, meaning, right relationship, sobriety, nature connection, death doula, climate, imagination, morning pages, the artist's way, wilderness, grief, belonging, mindfulness, purpose

Podcast Keywords: Meaning of Life Interviews | meaning of life conversations | exploring life | big life questions | meaning of life discussions | creating a meaningful life​

What is What is a Good Life??

A project exploring the big questions around how we live, who we are and what actually matters. Over the past four years, I’ve sat with more than 300 people — artists, parents, executives, wanderers, therapists, and strangers and invited them into a simple but profound inquiry, "What is a good life for you?"
The conversations explore presence, paradox, uncertainty, and the moments that shape a life - love and loss, trust and fear, clarity and not knowing. It’s an invitations to slow down, to listen deeply, and to bring you into conversation with your own life. There are new episodes every Tuesday.