A Sunday Stroll

I was doing some hiking today when I started thinking about objectivity, which led me to quality of life and then to the question of quality itself. - I should get out more, you say. - I was out hiking what more do you want?

So here comes the question right out of "The Dialogues of the Funky Buddha." Is there an objective way to assess quality of life?

First question is what do we mean by quality. It is a word that is bandied about in such diverse places as marketing and baseball. It has come to mean a standard of somewhat amorphous goodness, when it doesn't mean an accidental property of something to scientists. "Quality is job one" and so forth. I think though we don't really mean a standard of goodness when we mean a "Quality of Life." That I take to mean elements of life that lead to a sense of fulfillment. So we're talking about Pirsig's notion of quality. That which provides richness, satisfaction, a sense of a life lived fully and well.

Next question is what do we mean by objective. This is another word that gets slung about and sometime rather inexactly. Something which is objective can be measured empirically by an outside standard. We suggest that people can be objective about situations or listen objectively. Can't be done unless you mean they put a stopwatch to measure how long one talks or they count the number of people in the situation. We use objective to mean dispassionate which it is not necessarily. We use it to mean impartial again not an exact match. A referee is impartial, a psychiatrist is dispassionate neither is objective. A scientist looking at a graduated cylinder full of liquid to note the volume is objective. Anytime a human being thinks about something it becomes subjective. The example I was thinking of was a question like "Is this person beautiful?" You can present a picture as your ideal standard of beauty for comparison and be as dispassionate and impartial as you want there is no way to measure the person in question with the picture and determine if s/he is beautiful. It requires subjectivity.

So to our initial question. Certainly there are things about a life that can be measured; its duration, its influence (by the number of people encountered), the distance it has traveled, the volume or value of things acquired, however none of these is essentially a determination of the quality of a life. Long and short lives have been some happy and some miserable. So to with other measures suggested. There is also no set of behaviors to pin down a quality in life; solitude or society, activity or stillness, passion or calm. Quality of life can be identified with all of these things in different proportions for different lives. Finding one's own ideal proportions is perhaps the most important struggle we face because it can only be found by trial and error and is often only recognized after it has ceased to be the correct proportion.

I believe that we have determined that quality of life is in fact entirely subjectively determined and cannot be measured in any way. I would perhaps go further to say that nothing meaningful can be determined objectively where humans are involved. Everything requires judgment and analysis.

This being said, why do we waste our time and energy trying to educate our children in a way that "encourages objective measurement." Standardized tests, grades, rankings. None of this prepares a child for life. Your boss is not objective, by definition can't be. The people you meet and in the end your own assessment of what has value in your life and the appropriate way to pursue the richness of which we spoke earlier; all subjective. I suppose education is a topic for another day.