How do you judge what is a “quality” life?

/ 8 September 2009

I judge a quality life based on what I consider to be the most important qualities of what life can be. These qualities are family, society, a healthy relationship with someone, friendships that are great, and finally that you are happy. The culmination of all these is what I judge to be a quality life. Family is the most important as it is your roots as well as your support net and home life. If you want it or not your parents and siblings will always be there as a safe zone for you in personal hard times. The goal everyone has of creating a decent family of their own helps to enrich your life and keep it on track. Without family one has a deep valley of darkness in its place where nothing else can reside. One cannot rest in the safety it provides nor feel good about themselves based on the accomplishments they did in creating and/or sticking with a family if they don’t allow a family to engulf them. Society can be thought of as the community in which you live as well as the society we are part of, which for me is what can be defined as American society. The community grounds you to a geographical location and forms the limbs on which you bring up your family. We all rely on it for friendships and the continual social interactions that provide us with insights on the world around us. It is the drawing board on which we draw up our lives from day to day. Having a healthy relationship with someone will provide added stability as well as the foundational supports for a functional family of your own. This cannot come out of simply knowing someone, but rather has to come out of getting to know them to the deepest level. Not all relationships are healthy, either. Most aren’t, but that’s why having a healthy relationship is a core quality of what life can be that is needed to have a quality life. Creating and sticking to a network of a few closely knit really good friends will provide you with much-needed wriggle space when you have to get away from either your family of society in full. Friends are also a rational second-opinion tool for almost anything. They can put things that are tripping you up into terms that you can wrap your head around. The reason this kind of friend isn’t just a coworker or neighbor is because the two of you need to have a deep enough relationship that you won’t get into disagreements when you go to them for consolation. The final key requirement to how I judge a quality life is that it is happy. You can’t simply have the other elements I mentioned and have a quality life. You also need to be genuinely happy and have fun living amongst these and other elements of your life for it to be judged a quality life by me. The very meaning of a quality life is not definable in the way that most words are in dictionaries. Rather it is put together from many elements that each individual agrees upon with themselves and therefore is different for every single person. So this is the first level of how I, Alexander Celeste, judge a quality life. But it’s not the entirety of how I judge a quality life, nor is it the same as how any single one of you would judge a quality life.

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