Thinking of you

I started this summer feeling a bit unsure as to what I should do with the 3 months ahead of me. There were lots of possibilities as to what I could do but I never had any confidence picking just one or two so I wondered if there was a framework that I could learn to make this indecisiveness go away. I looked into Plato and Aristotle, seeing how their good life philosophies compared with more modern quality of life research and came up with the model: relationships, purpose, autonomy and health in that order of importance. It's made up of things that I have found most important in my own life and also some research but despite this I think it applies quite broadly.

I started the list off with relationships as most important, I thought connection could come here but I think relationships is less abstract and easier to think of when it comes to having a sense of direction. When I think back to my happiest memories they are always with the people I love the most. It's also quite universal that family and friends come first so I didn't really want to try and contest that.

I chose purpose over meaning for the same point of being more concrete and easier to grasp. At least for me purpose was never something I recognised in the moment, I typically look back and think yeah I was pretty motivated towards that one thing for a while. Usually it was misguided and directed towards things I thought I wanted but this framework has helped me search for a more sustainable purpose.

Purpose is often named as one of the fundamental pillars in life satisfaction studies so I wanted to explore different ways people found purpose in their lives. So initially I looked at job studies that correlate purpose and particular job titles like clergy members, medical practitioner, certain service jobs and I was curious as to the mechanism between jobs that people do and why their lives are better for it.

First I looked at the tasks that make up the purposeful jobs and a pattern emerged. It seemed that directly doing something important for another person makes up how purposeful they felt their job was. The more important the job like surgery, spiritual guidance, search & rescue, the more life satisfaction the individual felt. This lends itself to another pattern that jobs which required more competency were the ones that made people feel less expendable. Essentially meaning that because of your job, you intuitively know you matter, and that the world would be worse off without you. In my opinion, that's quite a solid foundation for self worth. I realised though that this requires some sort of emotional involvement with your work.

If you aren't emotionally attached to the outcome, like a sense of pride or belief in what you are doing then it will become just any old job. I found this out from quite a nice study about hospital cleaners: they found that there is a greater variance in the purpose felt by different people working the same job than there is across different jobs. Which means that there are bigger individual differences at play which in this case is perfect because they are easy to adopt. After interviews they found the cleaners who felt the most purpose considered themselves part of the healing process; they would leave a glass of water, a box of tissues, a word of reassurance, all of which not listed in their job description but done anyway for their own individual sake. The most notable action came from a housekeeper who would rearrange the pictures on the wall of a comatose patient to see if a change of scenery might help. To say these people weren't emotionally involved with their job wouldn't be true and it's an important distinction if we want to find purpose. I think the main reason for some jobs commanding higher purpose ratings than others is because they force emotional involvement due to their severity and proximity to other people.

For autonomy the idea was simple, without freedom to do as you wish and go where you please then you'll probably be pretty miserable. Analogies range from prisoners to slaves to teenagers rebelling against 'the system'. But there are a lot of things that give us autonomy, arguably the biggest one being money. Salary has always positively correlated with life satisfaction. My mum always says 'money gives you options' and she's right, and I think it's why we like it so much. We like having the option to do different things. Having the right connections does the same thing, 'network is net worth' as it were. Having the right connections gives you more options. It all feeds into autonomy.

Lastly health is obviously important the main reason being that you can't do any of the other things if you're not both physically and mentally healthy. Relationships lends itself most effectively to mental health which is a cyclical part of this musing that I find quite nice.

What I eventually derived from this list is that while all are important for the good life, some of them are more so just structural considerations rather than guidance about how your life should be directed. Physical health is the main one as it's just an accumulation of good habits really, but I also think practically it's a good vehicle to engage with the other element. Like arranging a social run club, which covers all 4 bases. Autonomy I think can be thought of partly as structure but perhaps less controllable than physical health. To me, things like picking the job with better hours and better pay lend themselves to autonomy, but they aren't always readily available to just take, they're usually a result of being better at something which takes time. Although if you find purpose or are passionate about your work then one with 'bad hours' might be alright, that's why I think autonomy is a bit mixed.

So to bring all of this together I had a thought that there was something connecting all of these wellbeing essentials and it's thinking of other people.

When we think of other people and involve ourselves fully in their world, we see them, and when people feel seen by each other, they tend to draw closer together. And closer relationships are better for everyone. I think we can only feel useful when we are in service to other people, so thinking of people that we can significantly help gives us a purposeful job to do. And when we are shown gratitude we are reminded of our purpose. When we think of other people, we progress greatly towards a collective, more cohesive world while simultaneously building the Good Life. See how it goes.

Thinking of you. Think of me!