Quality of life

What is the purpose of our living? Leaving aside such ideas like fate or destiny, if we are left all by ourselves, what ideally should we do with our life? My realisation is: our motivation to live is our expectation that we may be happy (here I am talking about who have a clinically good mental health – have no desire for death).

But this expectation seems to remain in the unconscious of most of us. Somebody external to every person is always telling us, what to want and how much. We are driven by stimuli external to us throughout life. And it has its consequences. This gives rise to confusion within us – making us suspicious toward everything around us.

When I look back at myself and browse my thoughts, actions etc. in a retrospective, I find myself mostly preoccupied with tense, somewhat glum thoughts. When I dig into it I see my deep distaste for scepticism as the cause for this ailing of mine. Lack of scepticism is mostly looked at as naivety by most of the people. But I see a sort of duality in a person who longs for happiness and at the same time gives it away at the cost of scepticism.

This deteriorates the quality of our life. Living is not only about consumption. We consume largely to satisfy our feelings. Good feelings are part and parcel of good life. To lead a life of good quality, it is very important that we feel good and free from stress. Living behind scepticism can help us in that.

Trust builds a truly civilized system. Sophistications, leading to advancement can come only when the prevailing conditions are positive for that. One of the main requirements for such conditions is the placidity, unperturbed atmosphere, which can never be there so long trust is not there. If people do not have mutual trust, they will remain preoccupied in short lived issues, things which are less constructive. This is obvious because in such situations people will tend to find out quick fixes to issues which often call for thorough considerations. And thus it is more likely that small things, which may have far reaching consequences, are left out, which lessens the probability that the solution will not be long lasting.

We must give some serious thoughts to the question – what do we really need and how much. This calls for introspection – we have got to know ourselves. We are prone to following the world around us. In one of his short stories, Tagore observed that some part of a person’s life is made up by God, some by others and the rest is made by the person by him or herself. Leaving aside God, actually a large part of the lives of ours are done up according to what others say to us. Apart from our near and dear ones, these others include those elements of the society which depend upon us for their own existence. These elements are the numerous social institutions. It can always be argued that existence of a lot of individuals depend upon these elements. Here comes the question of how much. How much really a person need? Do these institutions take care of that? Such institutions are mostly driven by numbers which denote volumes or quantities. Many (most?) of them do not have anything to do with how such numbers are going to affect the conditions in future. They are mostly run by the philosophy of simply changing their outfit when they can no longer handle the parameters they juggle with to achieve a large value of the number they are concerned with.

One of the factors such institutions are much concerned about is the mass. The numbers the institutions try to achieve are actually votes given by the mass – more precisely: we the people. The institutions change their outfit according to the demand of the mass. So we have the power to determine, at least to some extent, to make the institutions think about our future. To do that, we have to be careful about what part of the products these institutions offer us, are we going to accept, and that also, very importantly, how much. Satisfaction is not derived always from quantity; we have to be able to enjoy every bit of whatever we have - may it be of whatever small quantity. The social institutions should cater that to us in terms of quality. Only careful response from mass can change the philosophy of these institutions, which in the long run will determine the quality of life we live.

Quality is not only about material or our physical life; it is about our mental life as well. The better thought we give to ourselves, our mind, soul, our inner life, the better we know ourselves; the better we know what we really need and how much. That in turn is going to help us live a better life – now and for ever.