Is A Life Well Lived Worth Anything?
Is a Well Lived Life Worth Anything? By Steven Spear and H. Bowen
The economy we have today will let you chow down on a supersize McBurger, check derivative prices on your latest smartphone, and drive your giant SUV down the block to buy a McMansion on hypercredit.
How would you define a good life? It's a bafflingly tough question. An even tougher one: does the economy we have today value such a life? Does it help us create one?
Here's what I see when I look not just at the surface, but deep inside the heart of the economy today:
Instead of an "energy industry," I see a resource addiction that saps money and preserves self-destructive expectations. I see, instead of food and education "industries," an obesity epidemic and a debt-driven education crisis. Instead of a pharmaceutical industry, I see a new set of mental and physical discontents, like rates of suspiciously normally "abnormal" mental illnesses and drugs whose lists of "side effects" are longer than the Magna Carta. Instead of a "media industry," I see news that actually misinforms instead of enlightening — rusting the beams of democracy — and entertainment that merely titillates.
I believe the quantum leap from opulence to eudaimonia (a meaningful life) is going to be the biggest, most significant economic shift of the next decade, and perhaps beyond: of our lifetimes. We're not just on the cusp of, but smack in the middle of nothing less than a series of revolutions, aimed squarely at the trembling status quo (financial, political, social): new values, mindsets, and behaviors, fundamentally redesigned political, social, economic, and financial institutions; nothing less than reweaving the warp and weft of not just the way we live--but why we live, work, and play.
You can read full article at
http://blogs.hbr.org/haque/2011/05/is_a_well_lived_live_worth_anything.html
Life is what we make of it. We exercise that choice at every waking moment. Do we give time to our friends and children or do we climb the greasy pole in the hope of putting a round end on a rectangular swimming pool?
Don't take yourself too seriously, all our lives are inconsequential.
When we pass away our names are writ in water.
http://greendayfreak007.deviantart.com/art/John-Keats-Grave-Rome-187532542
I'd add the sobering message that was on a clock in the Commonwealth Bank in Queens street Brisbane many years ago,
"You know my time but you do not know your own"