Quality of Life

What is Life?

Unless we know what life is, we cannot approach its quality. Therefore, we must first answer life's question.

What is the Question?

When all is silent, there are only two questions, which essentially is only one:

"What is the meaning of life?", and "What is the meaning of suffering?". If you answer one, you have answered the other.

What is the Answer?

There are probably as many answers as there are people.

However, there are two main streams:

1. Those who are in search of "Happiness".

2. Those who are in search of "Self-Actualization".

Happiness

If happiness is the goal of life, then suffering is its hell. For hedonists, happiness determines the quality of life, since happiness is the need to be fulfilled, and the quality the ability to fulfill that need.

Hedonism, can only make us happy for some time, but it always must give away to suffering, since fulfillment is not sustainable in a changing world.

Therefore, you will find yourself forever redefining "happiness", as it will follow our needs as they change throughout our lifetime. It is this fallacy that makes us aim for prosperity, money, and greed to fulfill our perceived need for happiness.

Self Actualization

Shakespeare, through Hamlet, posed the question as: "To be or not to be" rather than "To become or not to become". This means that we do not have to become something else, as we already are what we need to be.

The old Greeks posed the question as: "Know thyself", which translates into "Who are you?". It is our task to find out who we really are.

In a more modern version of the ancient sages: "Are we physical beings trying to get spiritual experience, or are we spirits trying to get physical experience?"

Funny enough, we attain happiness as a by-product of finding ourselves, not by looking for it.

Definition of the Quality of Life

The Quality of Life is the totality of features and characteristics of the varying environments and changing conditions/circumstances that bear on their ability to satisfy the human needs for actualization at four levels of awareness:
  1. Physical
  2. Emotional
  3. Mental
  4. Spiritual
Back to where we left off in QOL, The NEXT QUESTION

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