Understanding how much is enough and imagining the solution

Robert and Edward
 Skidlesky's book.

Considerations about what is and what isn’t the good life are as common as opinions: everyone has one.

However growth ideologues have, in contemporary times, hijacked and distorted the human sense of what is worthy and marketed their contorted interpretation of the good life.

The modern rich, developed world is populated by people who equate the good life with accumulation of all it produces, along with the imagined enjoyment of the pleasures that stash of “stuff” brings.

Others have quite a different view and so liken the good life to one of privation and for some the higher life, or good life, only arrives after an ascetic life.

The debate about what is the good life and how you access it is as old as man, but rather than closing in on the answer, it is becoming more remote.

Many equate the good life and happiness with growth and wealth, but extensive and world-wide research point to weaknesses in that argument illustrating that once fundamental needs are answered, the good life and happiness rests on other immeasurable “goods”.

Writing in their 2012 book “How much is enough?: Money andthe Good Life” Robert and Edward Skidlesky said: “The basic goods are qualities, not quantities, objects of discernment, not measurement”.

Those “goods”, according to the Skileskys are health, security, respect, personality, harmony with nature, friendship and leisure.

Personality is about one being able to frame and execute a plan of life that reflects their tastes, temperament and conception of the good, while leisure must be accompanied by the term “purposeful”.

Interestingly, most men live much longer than they ever did, but that cannot be attributed to growth and nor can growth claim those other basic “goods” mentioned earlier.

The United Kingdom has doubled its per capita income since 1974, but residents have not tightened their grip on those basic goods, and in some respects they now have fewer of them.

“We have chased after superfluities and neglected necessities,” the Skidleskys wrote.

The good not mentioned by the Skidleskys is “imagination”, probably the most powerful, and underused, attribute of the human repertoire.

People of all stripes are obedient to the growth mandate and through a lack of imagination seem unable to conceive of a world in which they could easily and regularly access those basic goods through the abandonment ego boosting consumption.

That consumption, clearly indicated by a host of respected reports, has the world on a perilous path and so until we can imagine the good life without the need to exploit finite resources we will stumble blindly toward the abyss.

The good life waits, but our inability to forego present delights and embrace that new actuality is what darkens its dawn.