I think Quality of Life should be on everyone’s minds, all the time. The question of whether our Quality of Life will improve or not should be the basic criteria for many decisions.
When I say ‘our’ I mean, both, individually and collectively. Self-interest means having only an individual view of the word ‘our’. I’ve come to the conclusion that self-interest has been the most important factor in depriving people in terms of Quality of Life. The self-interested have hoarded wealth, leaving us with poverty and lack of living wages. The self-interested have abused their employees and the natural environment, leaving us with hatred for our employers, polluted water, air, and soils together with mounds of garbage. I can’t believe I’m in a minority to be against poverty, without enough money to live, or to drink polluted water, breathe polluted air, or live on and grow things in polluted soils, nor want to live anywhere near a mound of garbage. It is clear to me that such do not improve our collective Quality of Life.
I find it difficult to understand why our societies haven’t evolved sufficiently over their long existence to have solved many long-standing problems. With little effort, I could identify many things we, as a society, have spent much of our time and effort that in no way contributed to solving many of our collective problems. The blame isn’t just on our governments, but also on our industries, our institutions, and our selves, also collectively. Many of the issues we still face today could have been and should have been priority for being solved long ago.
I think Quality Of Life should be talked about more often, especially by politicians, by business leaders, and most especially about their constituents, their employees, and customers. The fundamental, underlying and even overarching, goal of all levels of government should be for continuous improvement of our Quality of Life. To me, the only purpose and reason for which government even exists is to improve our collective Quality of Life.
Improving Quality of Life is important and we must have ways to measure our progress. To me, progress means many things – maturation, education, age, abilities, eliminating problems, becoming more efficient, attaining goals, finding new knowledge to explain how things work, envisioning how things could be, technological advancement. Progress implies a movement or change from one lesser state to another higher state – less people living in poverty; all people having living wages; eliminating water, air, and soil pollution, and reducing waste are all things that can be measured. In order to make good decisions we need to become more mature, to get better educated, to expand our knowledge, abilities and skills, develop new technologies, seek to fully understand things. We also need to learn to identify root problems and how to best explore alternative solutions. We need to be more focused on the real problems; more efficient and effective, less wasteful.
Political debate should be entirely about clarifying and defining what constitutes Quality of Life and how to achieve it. We’ll make mistakes, and trial and error is often the only way to test things. But the goals should be clear and progress should be continuously evaluated. Let’s develop a clear vision of how wonderful things could be and pursue each supportive project to a satisfactory end.
I think we should require that our politicians publish their proposed policies together with detailed explanations of how their policies will improve our collective Quality of Life. Not only could we more easily compare politician’s priorities and proposals, but our choice when voting would be so much simpler.
Thanks, Jim.