How do you measure quality of life? Or more precisely: how do you measure the change in quality of life caused by acquiring a new item?

Any item you acquire potentially affects your life in numerous ways, which can be split into positives and negatives:

Positives:

1. You can do new things you couldn't do before
2. You can do old things faster or better
3. The new thing is smaller, more durable, more efficient, or prettier than something it replaces
4. The new thing replaces more than one other thing, allowing you to reduce the number of things you have
5. The item may have sentimental value after a while
6. Others...?

Negatives:

1. The new thing might not replace an old thing, so now you have more things to worry about: it might get stolen, it might get damaged or destroyed, it occupies more of the finite space in your home, etc.
2. You have to maintain the new thing (or you don't, but if you don't you'll likely have to replace it sooner, which results in more money spent per unit time; a stitch in time, and all that)
3. The new thing takes time and energy to learn how to use properly
4. Whatever the new thing allows you to do might not be something you really need to be doing, wasting time or distracting you from things that are more important
5. It cost finite resources to acquire (money, time) that might have been better spent in other ways
6. The new thing might not be as useful or effective as advertised, leading to disappointment or frustration
7. The new thing, if it conveys information (books, movies, TV, magazines), might contain messages which are detrimental (advertising) to your well-being
8. Even if something is generally positive, you might use it so infrequently that you get very little benefit out of it
9. The new thing might have unknown dangers (toxic chemicals) that no one knows about, or that the producers of the thing know about but have kept hidden
10. The item may have sentimental value after a while -- yes, this is both a positive and a negative
11. Others...?

(These obviously don't all operate on the same scale of importance, and each item's scale might not be linear. I'll analyze these in more detail in another post.)

One (relatively simple) way to look at it is that you could quantify each of these things, add them up, and if the total score is positive, then the thing improves your quality of life.

Let's assume you want to reduce the amount of stuff you have. You sort all the objects by their score and get rid of the lowest-scoring ones first. So when do you stop? You need to establish a threshold score above which you keep the items. One hopes that this score is high enough that you no longer have to spend very much time worrying about stuff.

Another factor is that your state of mind affects all this. It's not just objective judgments of whether an item is helpful or not; if you don't care about watching TV, then it doesn't matter how high-scoring a particular TV is, it's irrelevant to you. A TV's only function might then be for receiving emergency notifications in case of a disaster, which still gives it value, but of a very different kind than what most people use it for (entertainment). So one can make it easier to reduce the number of things in one's life by changing one's priorities. (Which is obviously not as easy as throwing an item in the trash.)

So what to do? If you're at home, look around you. There's probably fifty items within your sight that you could throw in the trash and not really ever miss once. Recently I read a blog entry by a woman who decided to chuck it all and go live on a boat, roaming the seas. She only brought what she thought were the absolute necessities. A few weeks out, she was hit by a storm that nearly capsized her boat, and half of what she had went overboard. She realized that she hadn't needed most of those things she had considered necessities.

Don't you think we landlubbers can do better than we are? Because it's not just our immediate, day-to-day quality of life that's at stake here... but I'll talk about that later.

Labels: quality-of-life

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