What Is a Minimally Good Life?(psyche.co) |
What Is a Minimally Good Life?(psyche.co) |
I don't think there is much substance to be found here.
The "generic sense" of "men" to mean humans is sexist - blatantly so. It's also quickly becoming archaic, for this reason. Going out of your way to use it, instead of "people" or "humans" or "humanity", is now a statement.
Wait. Is this thread becoming a weak paraphrase of The Selfish Gene?
The book has some pretty controversial opinions, but _Sex at Dawn_ has a lot of good insight about how important community and sharing are to a social species such as humans and how we might have lost that strong sense of community with the advent of agriculture and consequent abundance.
I'd go even further and weight-in the whole lineage.
I believe my grand parents on both side were damaged, leading to damaged parents, producing a very dysfunctional me.
It's like driving with the brakes on.. I speculate that the efficiency of not having to fight toxicity constantly leads to a thick rain of happy.
To the point that if I have children, I'd be sure to regularly send them away so they can see the world outside my sphere of influence.
What if the parents were parented badly and thus lack emotional capacity.
What if they were parented badly because the grand parents were parented badly?
- a loved and loving partner, a sane and fulfilling sexuality
- enough income to not have any substantial worries about the future
- absence of other justifiable existential worries and anxiety about the future such as cataclysms, threats, oppressive social, political and work environments, political instability, etc.
- a decent amount of recognition in work or private life (one of them suffices, both are optimal)
- good mental and physical health
Beneficial is also frequent contact to about 3-4 close friends.
That's what I've gathered from what I've heard on the Net during the past 20 years or so. If any of the above is missing, the life will not really be good.
I like this framing a lot. It's sort of the aggregate societal-level Golden Rule. Would you be willing to play "Real-Life the MMO" if you didn't know which character you'd be dropped into?
However, there is an interesting wrinkle you can apply to it that I think explains many of the moral differences along the progressive-conservative spectrum that I see in the US today. Consider:
* Would you be content to live the life that the least fortunate in our society lives?
* Would you be content to live the life that the least fortunate in our society lives including the personal choices they have made?
In other words, how much are you willing to chalk up misfortune to personal responsibility versus random unfair vagaries of life? Would you still be willing to play "Real-Life the MMO" if you might be dropped into a level 20 character with an already established history and had to take their life from there?
The conservative American perspective stated hyperbolically is that all bad outcomes are a result of poor choices. Many even seem to imply a just-world hypothesis that random events like disease are the universe magically punishing people for moral failings. The equivalent hyperbolic progressive view is that no one ever deserves any bad outcome and that misery is always a result of systemic factors outside of the individual's control.
Somewhere in the middle is probably closer to the truth.
It also asks whether a reasonable, caring and free person would trade places with the worst off, which I'd find very unlikely. What you can realistically do about it is unknown.
>The thought is that having some distance from each person’s experience will help us see whether that person really needs all the things they think they need.
What works for you, doesn't work for me, and the other way round. Apart from the basic NEEDS (some call it "four walls" - shelter, utilities, transportation, basic groceries) everything else is a WANT. And it is great to have wants. A friend wanted to buy a desk globe for herself. She offered to buy me one too. I responded with a big NO. Not that I would not appreciate the gesture, I know that I would not appreciate a big thing on my table, that I can't use for nothing.
On the other hand, a nice puzzle hanging on my wall is cool, and it takes no space, and I don't have to move it around to make one more puzzle :)
>would trade places with the worst off
During COVID I saw with my own eyes that you can go from 100-to-1 in 6 months if you haven't made sure you got emergency funds on the side, if you don't have a solid safe work, you don't have amassed consumer debt, etc. As a mental exercise it is good to think the scenario "what if I lose my job, and I can't get another one for X amount of months"? Dave Ramsey suggests emergency funds to be able to fully cover 3-6 months. Those 3-6 can be stretched to 6-12 if you decide to make major cuts in lifestyle (food, subscriptions, smaller house/flat, sell a car and start cycling, etc.)
- Letters from a Stoic, Seneca
- On the Shortness of Life, Seneca
- Walden, Henry David Thoreau
- Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck
As someone with ok health and a decent education to provide me work throughout the pandemic, I feel like the minimally good life is just life itself. It is enough to survive, and retain the will that you must choose to live. I've been very fortunate and very lucky, but it all feels so flimsy and discriminatory. I think the only "better" life one can work towards, is one in service of making it better for all of us.
I learned a lot of lessons (even entrepreneurial lessons) while in Cuba and hope to publish a series of blog posts on them when the day job becomes less frenzied.
By consuming less and demanding less, we live a low maintenance life. Not minimally good, just low-maintenance. This along with looking for ways to serve our communities is the better way to go.
Only 200kCal a day — less than half of a Snickers.
> we should consider whether we would be content to live the lives that the least fortunate in our society actually live
Stopped reading right there, because it's a complete non sequitur. People only owe one another what they have contractual obligations for; claiming that you owe to provide any kind of minimal standard of living for another person just because he also happens to live in the same society as you is completely absurd and deeply immoral.
Now, I agree that being charitable and thinking about others is moral, and that people who enjoy very comfortable lives without giving anything back to the community can be frowned upon. However, there is critically important distinction between doing something out of your own free will and our of obligation.
I always defend Nazis, who openly advocate for killing me and my family, right to free speech, and I would always defend the property rights of the heartless and greedy. Not because I want to condone this behaviour, but because no morality can be more important than personal freedoms.
This is a good read:
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/elal2/have_you_e...
Because this seems like a list of "pick some, but not all"... I'd say that 99.99 percent of humanity has not hit all of these goals ever in the history of humanity. If this is the minimally required list, then depression is way, way underdistributed.
There might also be a semantic issue here. For me as a philosopher, leading a good life is not the same as leading an acceptable, overall satisfying, or mostly good life. The way I understand "good life" sets the bar relatively high.
Urban design, whether you're stuck two hours in traffic to get to work, whether you work 35 or 60 hours, whether you can take a walk in your neighborhood at night in peace...
That seems like a strange use of the word minimal. Of the 40 people in my life I know close enough to know if they meet this definition only 4-8 meet it. And I'm probably close to the best age for finding all of these items, my mid 30s. Old enough for people to make money, and find a fulfilling career but before mental and physical health starts knocking out a bunch of people.
I'm at a point in my life where I can essentially go on autopilot when shopping for groceries and not worry about the cost. I still have to make other decisions based on money (do I take a vacation or upgrade my laptop?), but the side effect of those choices is NOT stress.
So there's some minimum income that everyone needs (and it's different between people) where they can "forget" about living expenses and still have a relatively stress-free life. I'd wager somewhere around 1.5x - 2x the cost of living.
I take into account volatility of future income in order to be stress free. Hence my goal was to own businesses where my labor wasn’t needed to keep the income flowing in case I get injured.
Dual income household where each person earns enough to cover expenses can serve a similar purpose.
There is a sad, almost Catch-22 in the typical U.S. city where you need a car to make money and need money to buy a car.
When I was unable to afford a car though I was able to find a (minimum wage) job and a place (well, room) to rent within a reasonable bicycle ride. (Yay, I did have a bicycle still from my high school days!) I did succeed though (was even able to begin college at a small community college — rode to my classes via bicycle).
The first thing I bought though after food, rent, tuition and books was a rust-bucket of a car so that I had more choices in employment. (Sucks that gas, repairs, insurance, and registration then ate even more of my paycheck, but that's another rant.)
To be sure, I still now experience discontent, anxiety, stress and other things in life even though money is no longer making my choices for me. But, yeah, money is not the one calling the shots.
It's easy to in fact look back on those impoverished times and feel like they were somehow less stressful, and I felt less anxiety and discontent then than I have in the decades following. I'm not sure if that's the big lie we tell ourselves or if instead it is correct: either because money then was such an overarching issue that all other issues had to "get in line", or because when life boiled down to work-school-rent there really were no other 2nd-order "Maslowian" needs that I could be bothered to trifle with.
Most of my choices, and certainly all of my major life choices (like where to live, what car to drive, what job to take) are still based around money.
Edit: good points in the responses. I don't worry about eating out, what to order, what brand of sundry to buy. I do try to optimize but as others have said, that's more of a desire than a requirement.
Having said that, I think the only people who truly never worry about money are children. I've heard stories about international students at universities whose parents buy them luxury car after luxury car when they crash them, that kind of thing. But I suspect it's pretty rare.
For example, I no longer scour the grocery store for the cheapest available option for every item I select. I no longer have to spend months finding the best value for a pair of shoes, a piece of furniture, etc.
Basically, if I spend a couple hundred dollars too much on stuff one month, I'll hardly notice it. Whereas, when I was poor, that was the difference between making rent or not.
Money is important if you either don't have enough to meet your basic needs or have so much that you don't have to worry about it 1 second in your life (99.9% of people won't reach that state). Every steps in between is the same with extra distractions that won't do much, if anything at all, for you overall happiness.
There's things other than lifestyle creep. For example, many families tend to increase their income as they get older. But the expenses also go up. Having one kid, vs 2 - 3 later on, or kid expenses when they are young vs. teenage years (where you now have to worry about increased car insurance, getting them vehicles, etc). And upgrading housing as the family grows. The effect is that your income constantly seems to be outpaced by increasing and recurring expenses.
So what happens is parents get into the mindset of doing without, so their kids can thrive. And when problems come up, they will sacrifice so that additional money can be thrown at fixing those problems. This doesn't let up until the kids are grown, and then you can sell the house and downsize. All of a sudden, your cars are paid off, the kids are doing good on their own (or you've disowned them), your housing costs is lower because you moved to a smaller house, which means utility bills are smaller too. This is now the point where people hit midlife crisis, they have surplus money and have pent up demand to "treat themselves" so go out and buy something expensive (sports car, motor home, boat, etc). And the tightened budget stress starts all over again.
I also reflect that the most significant choices are those which are within one's locus of control, the awareness of that is foundational to a life of virtue and money never seems un-constraining even if objectively one controls more of it.
All questions are fractal in nature, and unsolvable without a problem-domain. By defining the domain a thing can be answered, such as "how much force do i need to throw this ball over there?" Otherwise no definite answer can be provided, because the next galaxy over tips the scales just a bit, as does the infinitesimally small difference in the ball's structure, and so forth.
>During COVID I saw with my own eyes that you can go from 100-to-1 in 6 months if you haven't made sure you got emergency funds on the side
This is why I think a social aid/basic income system with free healthcare is a must. You can't choose to be healthy and not to have accidents. I think we must all provide a basic net for the things outside our control. Of course I'm biased, being a finn in covid times is a tremendous blessing
I played cautiously knowing that an injury could upend my family and my little sister’s future, and I didn’t partake in school sports or anything that could disturb my parents as they were already busy working 24/7 and it would have stressed them even more to have to pick me up or pay for equipment.
Where you might not get to go to the doctor no matter how you feel daily, and you might have to walk to work because you can't afford a tire. I'm still happy to have hot water simply because I couldn't afford it for some years.
Life is so much less stressful when you have money leftover at the end of the month - enough to cover small emergencies and keep a $25 expense from ballooning into having electricity disconnected.
Granted, I think they've proven that after a certain point, money has diminishing effects on happiness, but I think it is mostly that you simply that it consumes your life less and less and gives you the means to think about other, more positive things than how to afford new shoes.
None of the things in OP’s list are universals. Most people are happier if they have financial security, but some people find happiness in an ascetic and minimal lifestyle for example. And many poor people are very happy. The list therefore seems to reflect major factors that reflect happiness for the population in general. And, worldwide, participation in religion and having kids are to such factors. For much of the world that’s financially or politically insecure, they are two of the most important factors. Overlooking them completely is quite misanthropic.
You're right that religion and community also play a role in happiness. That should be in the list. However, the rest of what you say is just wrong, or at least very misleading. People in very poor countries are overall less happy or satisfied with their life (according to their own reports) than people in richer countries.
There is a basic level of welfare that anyone who wants to be happy needs to attain. If you don't have that, then there will be all kinds of worries, e.g. you're worried about losing your income when you get sick or how to get enough food for your children. In that case, you cannot be happy. The basic needs and any existential worries associated with them cannot be substituted with religion or anything else.