I agree with the quality of life factors in this post for those who can afford them. Perhaps an article that addresses the life limitations that some face due to oppression is also in order. Is there any way to experience a level of satisfaction for someone living in a refugee camp, for example. You have personal experience with meditation and this might be a way to escape a life without autonomy. Something along the line of traveling in the space of one's imagination. The same might be true for a person living with a terminal illness that confines them to a bed. I have some ideas regarding searching for life satisfaction when a person is bedbound. On many occasions, I have sung with people who are bedbound. This brought joy and escape for both the person in bed and for me.
Thank you for sharing your thoughts Lisa! These are great points and a lot of good food for thought. I agree with a lot of this and speak to this point a little bit in a previous post titled 'How Do We Become Better World Travelers' about how things like extensive travel and adventure are often luxuries and privileges that shouldn't be taken for granted.
I have read and witnessed videos of interviews of people that were in desperate situations like being in a refugee camp, or in concentration camps and people making the best of their awful situations by forming tight-knit communities that contributed greatly to their well-being. This was most apparent in the recent book I read about Japanese Interment in the U.S. during WWII and how remarkable it was that people managed to bring a great deal of meaning to those horrible circumstances. I believe the human capacity for resilience should not be underestimated, even in the darkest of situations.
Meditation also teaches you that autonomy and having the sense of being "free" is in fact not necessarily a product of material circumstances and with the right amount of training those with very little report feeling completely liberated and content. I'm thinking of Buddhist monks who live an ascetic life, renouncing material possessions, and even foregoing food for long periods who report states of euphoria and deep meaning living that way.
Lastly, I think there is something to be said about our modern culture today that is overwhelmingly status obsessed. In my opinion, we have an unhealthy knack for comparing ourselves to others both with those who have much more (keeping up with the Joneses or nowadays the Kardashians) and those who have much less. In the former case, one might presume that those with millions have it made so must be content and those in the latter must be miserable and unable to find life satisfying because they have so little. Neither of those are necessarily true which indicates to me that our minds have an incredible capacity to reframe more positively how we view the world and our place in it.
This is one of your best posts. I agree with most of your quality of life factors, but I think you miss some basic items that form the base of Maslow's hierarchy. You were very specific about drugs. Does this category include caffeine (in which case I agree!) or recreational drugs/alcohol (in which case I disagree)?
Concerning Maslow's hierarchy, I should have had a statement or two about the first tier of physiological needs and perhaps the second tier of safety. Perhaps I'd amend it by saying that these two tiers are certainly foundational but presumed. I'd have to give this some more thought but to me most of the needs on the base of the hierarchy e.g., air, water, food, heat, sleep, etc. strike me as biological necessities that are prerequisite conditions that then allow for things like self-actualization. They go without saying to me and seem to be in a somewhat different category than the meaning that constitutes a "good life."
Thank you! With regard to drugs, I'm more specifically referring to psychedelic nonaddictive substances like LSD, psilocybin, and MDMA which are actively being studied at places like Johns Hopkins (see link in the article and the work by Roland Griffiths) for a variety of therapeutic purposes including treating depression, anxiety, PTSD, and coping with loss and the end of life. A lot of the recent data has shown that even recreationally done in the right conditions that psychedelics have tremendous potential to add to the quality and meaning of one's life.
See Michael Pollan's 2018 book "How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence" (which also has a four-part documentary series on Netflix with the same title and also very good). Also the work of James Fadiman and his work on micro-dosing is interesting and worth looking into.
While perhaps not as beneficial I'd go so far to argue that things like alcohol and marijuana can potentially add some level of benefit to life if consumed under the right amounts and conditions. But the effects of all these drugs obviously vary widely and are not applicable to a lot of peoples' sensibilities which is why I'd be hesitant to add them into this general equation of the good life.
And just to put more emphasis on your larger point about limitations, I fully agree that addressing the constraints many of us live under is important to acknowledge and in need of greater analysis.
I agree with the quality of life factors in this post for those who can afford them. Perhaps an article that addresses the life limitations that some face due to oppression is also in order. Is there any way to experience a level of satisfaction for someone living in a refugee camp, for example. You have personal experience with meditation and this might be a way to escape a life without autonomy. Something along the line of traveling in the space of one's imagination. The same might be true for a person living with a terminal illness that confines them to a bed. I have some ideas regarding searching for life satisfaction when a person is bedbound. On many occasions, I have sung with people who are bedbound. This brought joy and escape for both the person in bed and for me.
Thank you for sharing your thoughts Lisa! These are great points and a lot of good food for thought. I agree with a lot of this and speak to this point a little bit in a previous post titled 'How Do We Become Better World Travelers' about how things like extensive travel and adventure are often luxuries and privileges that shouldn't be taken for granted.
I have read and witnessed videos of interviews of people that were in desperate situations like being in a refugee camp, or in concentration camps and people making the best of their awful situations by forming tight-knit communities that contributed greatly to their well-being. This was most apparent in the recent book I read about Japanese Interment in the U.S. during WWII and how remarkable it was that people managed to bring a great deal of meaning to those horrible circumstances. I believe the human capacity for resilience should not be underestimated, even in the darkest of situations.
Meditation also teaches you that autonomy and having the sense of being "free" is in fact not necessarily a product of material circumstances and with the right amount of training those with very little report feeling completely liberated and content. I'm thinking of Buddhist monks who live an ascetic life, renouncing material possessions, and even foregoing food for long periods who report states of euphoria and deep meaning living that way.
Lastly, I think there is something to be said about our modern culture today that is overwhelmingly status obsessed. In my opinion, we have an unhealthy knack for comparing ourselves to others both with those who have much more (keeping up with the Joneses or nowadays the Kardashians) and those who have much less. In the former case, one might presume that those with millions have it made so must be content and those in the latter must be miserable and unable to find life satisfying because they have so little. Neither of those are necessarily true which indicates to me that our minds have an incredible capacity to reframe more positively how we view the world and our place in it.
This is one of your best posts. I agree with most of your quality of life factors, but I think you miss some basic items that form the base of Maslow's hierarchy. You were very specific about drugs. Does this category include caffeine (in which case I agree!) or recreational drugs/alcohol (in which case I disagree)?
Concerning Maslow's hierarchy, I should have had a statement or two about the first tier of physiological needs and perhaps the second tier of safety. Perhaps I'd amend it by saying that these two tiers are certainly foundational but presumed. I'd have to give this some more thought but to me most of the needs on the base of the hierarchy e.g., air, water, food, heat, sleep, etc. strike me as biological necessities that are prerequisite conditions that then allow for things like self-actualization. They go without saying to me and seem to be in a somewhat different category than the meaning that constitutes a "good life."
Thank you! With regard to drugs, I'm more specifically referring to psychedelic nonaddictive substances like LSD, psilocybin, and MDMA which are actively being studied at places like Johns Hopkins (see link in the article and the work by Roland Griffiths) for a variety of therapeutic purposes including treating depression, anxiety, PTSD, and coping with loss and the end of life. A lot of the recent data has shown that even recreationally done in the right conditions that psychedelics have tremendous potential to add to the quality and meaning of one's life.
See Michael Pollan's 2018 book "How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence" (which also has a four-part documentary series on Netflix with the same title and also very good). Also the work of James Fadiman and his work on micro-dosing is interesting and worth looking into.
While perhaps not as beneficial I'd go so far to argue that things like alcohol and marijuana can potentially add some level of benefit to life if consumed under the right amounts and conditions. But the effects of all these drugs obviously vary widely and are not applicable to a lot of peoples' sensibilities which is why I'd be hesitant to add them into this general equation of the good life.
And just to put more emphasis on your larger point about limitations, I fully agree that addressing the constraints many of us live under is important to acknowledge and in need of greater analysis.
What is the name of the book about the Japanese Interment in the U.S. during WWII?
Heart Mountain: The History of an American Concentration Camp by Douglas Nelson. I can loan it to you some time if you like. :)