Journal Entry — “The Little Things That Make a Life”

 

I just finished watching Good Will Hunting, and I don’t know how to explain it — the film settled somewhere deep inside me. It wasn’t like the usual kind of movies I love (The Seventh Seal, Silence of the Lambs, God on Trial, No Country for Old Men). Those are stark, philosophical, heavy with questions about death, justice, chance, and the strange moral deserts of the human heart.

Good Will Hunting felt… gentler. But somehow just as profound.

It made me think about how life is more than just career, brilliance, or “making it.” We say this all the time, but the film actually shows it — in the little things, the imperfect things, the human things. The way Sean talks about his late wife, not with polished sentimentality, but with raw detail — the smell of a hospital room, the way imperfections turn into intimacy. There’s something painfully honest about that. Something I felt in my chest.

And then there’s Will. A genius who can solve equations that make professors sweat, yet terrified of the one thing that would make his life real: letting someone know him. Not the smart version of him. Him.

Maybe that’s what touched me the most. I realised how vulnerable it is to allow others into the places where we’re small — not brilliant, not impressive, just human.
And maybe that’s what I keep running away from too.

But the scene that really stayed with me was Will’s rant during the NASA/NSA interview. He basically tells them: “Sure, I could do the job. I could build something beautiful, sophisticated, brilliant. But somewhere, someone will die because of what I built — and no one will even know.”

I couldn’t help thinking of Hannah Arendt’s banality of evil. The way Eichmann wasn’t a monstrous figure dripping with malice but a bureaucrat who stopped thinking about the human cost of his obedience. Will refuses to be that. He refuses to turn human pain into an abstraction so he can feel good about a paycheck and the illusion of doing something “important.”

It struck me how close this is to Arendt’s warning: evil grows when people separate technical skill from moral imagination.

Maybe that’s why this movie hit me differently. Because beneath the jokes and the Boston slang, the film is doing something I love — the same thing Pascal, Lewis, Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky, and even Arendt do in their own ways. It’s asking:

What makes a life worth living?
Is a brilliant mind enough if the heart stays untouched?
Is success meaningful if you lose the little things?
The real things?

I kept thinking: life isn’t built in achievements; it’s built in human bonds — tender, risky, imperfect, but real. And maybe that’s where meaning hides, not in the grand narratives but in the small choices we make to stay human.

Maybe that’s the lesson I needed tonight.