Party of Five

You know how people are constantly evaluating how far in life they've come versus the traditional idea of success, etc? Well, those things can pretty much be distilled down to five general categories. Career, family, relationships, friends, and miscellaneous. That last one is tricky because it could be totally different for everyone. Health, religion, general state of being, comparison to peers, whatever.

Basically what I'm going to do in my head is assign 0-2 point values to each of the five categories and see what a particular person's happiness/life rating would be out of ten. Oh, and maybe minus points would be allowed for, you know, big minuses.

So I'm currently at a nice even 5/10 on this scale. Career (1), Family (1), Relationships (0), Friends (2), Misc (1). After giving some thought on it this weekend and batting this matrix around a little, we found a few people who might rank a nifty 9/10 on here. Okay, maybe just one or two people. Plus we're on the outside looking in so it's hard to tell if someone is really happy or not.

But that's kind of the point of this exercise, it's all about being on the outside looking in. When people are like "Oh, so how's so-and-so doing?" They are generally asking about these five things. I believe that if you can score a 8/10 by the time you're forty or so, you can say you've succeeded in life. And then maintain and try to cope. Or you know, just get crazy and wild.

Some guy developed the Oxford Happiness Inventory which is supposed to measure psychological well-being. From Wikipedia it says, "This measures happiness as an aggregate of self-esteem, sense of purpose, social interest and kindness, sense of humor and aesthetic appreciation." I'm not sure what these things have to do with happiness in the traditional sense but they seem interesting. Apparently this has been critiqued because it lacks a "theoretical model of happiness."

I'd like to research this some more and find out what other models of happiness exist. Here's one called the Emotional Quality Model and something called A Model of Happiness.