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I am lucky in that I get to speak directly with a wide variety of people from different backgrounds, ages and positions in life, which gives me a pretty broad view of society, albeit *mostly* limited to those who live in Finland, though many are not Finns. A lot of the people I speak to are happy with many aspects of their lives and while I have met people that have said they are "completely happy and wouldn't change a thing" the other things they say would indicate differently. We seem to all want to change in some way and, we want to change something outside us in some way.

![OI000709 2.jpg](https://files.peakd.com/file/peakd-hive/tarazkp/ik1fMu5D-OI000709202.jpg)

For many though, there seems to be the "stuck in a rut" issue, where people want to escape the current routines of their lives in some way at least, whether it be to have more leisure time or better conditions in their working life - they would like to be somewhere else. I think that this is one of the drivers of *escapism through consumption,* where people will consume in order to avoid dealing with the routine, as it introduces change of some kind into their life, not unlike a one night stand with a stranger, but this in itself can become a routine that holds back developing deeper processes to move forward in life. 

To me at least, it is pretty obvious that if we are avoiding doing what probably needs to be done to get to where we need to be, we are not only not going to get there, we are also going to feel the sense of failure for not even trying. I have met many successful failures in my life, people who feel that they have lived a life of value because they have tried and failed many times, but they keep trying. There seems to be an energy in these people and almost *without fail,* they end up having both the positive experience of trying and, a level of success that they enjoy. Most successful people seem to have failed a fair bit in various ways too. 

Perhaps part of the attraction of consumption is that there is no sense of failure in it, as it isn't really possible to *lose at consuming,* unless you count the opportunity cost of what else could have been performed instead. But, as long as one keeps consuming, they can avoid considering that cost - meaning there is no loss - *always a winner.* 

We know that we are generally risk averse, we know that we favor convenience over difficulty, we know that we do not like to be uncomfortable - but in the past through our needs of survival, we *had* to learn and act, or else we would very quickly die. Now however, we are able to maintain life while remaining quite passive, without having to learn much or do much in order to get enough to live off - although that *quality of life* has a lot of individual variation in it through any population. 

*Quality of life* is an interesting concept as we have tended to narrow the focus on what we can consume and then extrapolate quality life out to all the things we can buy, saying that items are the indicator of quality. When I was a kid, one of the indicators of QoL was how many televisions were in a home and a friend of mine had a very high quality of life, as his family had seven televisions, including one in the toilet. The problem with this kind of indicator is that it is a lie that can influence decision making, where we keep chasing and collecting narrow things, rather than being able to reflect and evaluate ourselves holistically. 

For example, a few years back there was a health report saying that the ease at which a person is able to move from a sitting position on the floor to a standing position was an indicator of health and longevity - and then people in Finland at least were practicing this move, as if being better at it would make them healthier and live longer. That is not the way it works, it isn't the movement that does it, the movement is an indicator of general well-being, practicing the movement alone doesn't increase that general well-being, it just skews the results of the test to make them useless as an indicator. 

But here we are trying to escape from lives that we don't want and into lives we do want through consuming a narrow set of indicators, without having the connectedness between all of the aspects of life that bring our sense of life satisfaction. I think that an illustration of this might be holidays, where I think that part of the satisfaction of being on holiday is that it has been earned and is deserved, meaning one has to have done some kind of work in order to get the reward, otherwise - it isn't a valuable reward - like a participation trophy that is in no way connected to performance. 

*Do people feel like they have earned their welfare payments?*

It is an interesting thing to consider, as while we just about all want more wealth in our lives, I think that most of us also want the sense that we deserve it in some way, that we have done something in this life that has added value so that we are rewarded for it. I am not saying everyone feels this way, but I have quite a few people close to me who could have essentially lived their life on the back of their parent's, with a couple likely being able to live for several generations this way - all of them wanted to *prove themselves* in some way - to work at something that they considered value adding to make their inheritance feel more earned than a pure gift. 

They also tended to know that they were lucky - of course, this is not always the case as some felt they were entitled to it, that the work of their parents was by extension their own in some way. But, I think that this is also part of the reason that people who do get a significant inheritance are "generous" in a way that they are more likely to spend that money and share it out, as they are less attached to it, as they haven't the sense of earning it themselves. Some people see this as squandering the hard work of their parents, but perhaps this is a good thing as it allows for some level of redistribution to those who might be working hard at something now. 

But, with many people seemingly trying to escape their own lives, I think that the road of consumption is going to lead most into a well of despair as over time, the avoidance to not only build and generate value is reduced, but the ability to cope with the uncertainties of life are reduced to. One of the benefits of consumption and it being "fail-proof", is that it doesn't inject many of the discomforts of the world and when it does get uncomfortable, for example by presenting ideas that are in conflict with a world view, it is very easy to "change channel" and find something more comforting to consume. 

I personally put a lot of value on work, because for me it brings in my sense of self and makes it a practical process, rather than subscribing to labeling myself on material items I own and identity traits like nationality or skin color. No one *earned* their skin color - it is a silly thing to be proud of or have prejudice against, in my opinion, as it doesn't inform much at all about what a person can actually do or, their experience or potential to add value to the world in some way. Getting rewarded in some way for something like skin color is ridiculous.

That sense of *earning and deserving* I believe is an important aspect of how we ascribe value to our lives and informs us personally on a lot of the quality of life. But, if we think we are entitled or deserving of some level of quality of life without having done anything to to earn it, we end up in a mental conflict. Perhaps this is what consumption does to us, as we spend so much time in a fantasy world of things that we desire, that we start to believe that we should have them by now and that the reason we don't have them is that the world is against us in some way, that we are victims of circumstance.

Should we be evaluating quality of life based on some group indications like the number of televisions or how many cars - or should we be taking *personal stock* of our lives and evaluating our life quality on the values that are important to us and, what we are doing to accomplish them? In my opinion, one of the biggest problems we have is that in order to escape the rut of routine, we need to actively opt-in to do something different, but what we seemingly keep doing as a society is passively opt-in to consuming more, which not only helps us avoid doing what we should and probably want, but gives us the ideas of what we need to consume next in order to feel hole - without encouraging the activity to get there. 

This means that we have an expanding set of desires, with less capability to fulfill them - which means we are effectively making ourselves less  and less likely to get to where we want to be, we keep digging ourselves deeper and deeper into a hole that is becoming shallower and shallower. 

Taraz
[ Gen1: Hive ]


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