“Don’t waste any more time arguing about what a good man should be. Be one.” Aurelius
“It is not death that a man should fear, but he should fear never beginning to live.” Aurelius
What you seek also seeks you. Rumi
When death comes to find you, may it find you alive. African Proverb
“We have two lives, and the second begins when we realize we only have one.” Confucius
“Many felt a profound unease at the idea that the sources of benevolence should be merely enlightened self, interest, or simply feelings of sympathy. This seemed to neglect entirely the human capacity for self, transcendence, the ability to move beyond self, centered desire altogether and pursue a higher aspiration.”, Charles Taylor, A Secular Age
“One must not attempt to dispel the ambiguity of one’s being but, on the contrary, accept the task of realizing it.”, Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity
“Do not be too moral. You may cheat yourself out of much of life that way. Aim above morality. Be not simply good; be good for something.” ― Henry David Thoreau
“You sensed that you should be following a different path, a more ambitious one; you felt that you were destined for other things, but you had no idea how to achieve them, and in your misery you began to hate everything around you.”, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Netochka Nezvanova
Strive for that greatness of spirit that measures life not by its disappointments but by its possibilities. W. E. B. Du Bois
“Give up your attachment to comfortable ways of living, show yourself in the gymnasium (gymnos = ‘naked’), prove that you are not indifferent to the difference between perfect and imperfect, demonstrate to us that achievement, excellence, arete, virtu, has not remained a foreign word to you, admit that you have motives for new endeavors! Above all: give the notion that sport is a pastime for the most stupid only as much credence as it deserves; do not misuse it as a pretext to drift further into your habitual state of self, neglect; distrust the philistine within yourself who thinks you’re just fine as you are! Hear the voice from the stone; do not resist the call to get in shape! Seize the chance to train with a god!” , Peter Sloterdijk
Below is an overview of various exercises that can be used in sociotherapy or as sociological self, help to become embedded in the social in a new way, a re, embedding, if you will. These exercises are framed by ABT’s various dimensions of balance. The assumption is that the individual strives for the good life across various balance dimensions that require trade, offs and balancing acts (Berglund, 2026). The purpose of a framework comprising 19 balance dimensions with associated states of balance and imbalance is to capture the complexity of the good life. All of this can overwhelm the individual, making the dimension of “simplexity” (a balance between simplicity and complexity) important to achieve. At the same time, it is important to acknowledge complexity, since a simplified view of the good life, which is sometimes taught in psychotherapy, can still lead the person into various difficulties. For example, one problem is that civic, political, and moral dimensions are not sufficiently present, which can result in goals such as functionality, emotional intelligence, flexibility, acceptance, happiness, peace, love, forgiveness, and compassion taking on a certain emptiness. Therapists have pointed out that they want to remain neutral and avoid being “moralizing”. They could easily have become so if they had based their approach on a specific moral theory. ABT is an attempt at a socio, ethical theory of values designed to capture the complexity and openness inherent in the search for the good life, enabling the therapist to employ moral language and make moral claims without becoming moralizing (Berglund, 2026). These ideas will be clarified in the section on Citizenship. There, it will be shown that the moral can be incorporated while simultaneously keeping it open. For example, the practice of virtue, based thinking and action aims to support the individual in thinking in terms of virtues rather than chains of thought that revolve, for instance, around conformity or emotionalized life goals such as happiness. Another example is participating in the civic struggle (Berglund, 2026), which does not dictate exactly what one should think or how one should act in that civic struggle; the purpose is to reduce the emphasis placed on the private struggle so that the dramas that may exist there lose intensity, making them easier to manage in contrast to the greater challenges one faces in citizenship.
Each section begins by explaining the dimension of balance and what a person balances between at different poles. This is followed by various exercises and ideas on how to achieve greater balance within that dimension. Some dimensions of balance are discussed together due to their proximity to one another.