When considering ideas such as life satisfaction and happiness it is quite easy to fall into a world of platitudes and clichés. Follow your passion this and buy experiences, not things that. Fortunately, we have been pondering (“pondering” as the philosophical umbrella term, much deliberate scientific study has been done as well) these ideas regarding what generates a “good life” for long enough in advanced socioeconomic parts of the world that we effectively have solved this dilemma. Or at a bare minimum, understand the attributes and actions that correlate strongly with life satisfaction. 

Though before going any further, I believe that it’s important to acknowledge how privileged we are to even consider the elements that constitute a good life. Aside from isolated groups like the ancient patricians and aristocrats of Greco-Roman antiquity, or middle-age Lords of Estate (along with the occasional artisan here and merchant there); until the industrial revolution, the only people who even could consider such ideas were royalty. The rest of us were focused on survival. Since the advent of agriculture and thus modern societies as we know them today, “life” was tending your farm from dawn to dusk or working as a manual tradesperson. And that is if you were lucky enough to be a free person to begin with. Now (as much as negativity-incentivized media would like you to disbelieve) modern economies have boosted the median standard of living so high that the question of, “what do I do with my life?” is something hundreds of millions (soon to be billions) of people have the privilege of asking. For those of us fortunate enough to live in these aforementioned modern economies, based on a standard 45 hour work week and a liberal 10 hours per day for designated sleep time (or sleep adjacent activities), we are left with roughly 55 hours of free time a week. 55 hours a week might sound like a lot to some, not nearly as much to others, but again, for 99.9% of human history, that number was close to zero. I don’t want to dive too deeply into the career path discussion here, as it’s an entire factory of worm cans in itself. For the sake of introducing the “good life” discussion though, assuming the standard 45 hour work week with a job that I’ll describe as “life-stabilizing” is a fine placeholder. In short, since human sustenance and survival are simply not scarce resources any more, the goal-posts have shifted. Time is now the bottleneck of the human experience (for now). Which from where this discussion began, leads back to royalty. The Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations, is an interesting case study to focus on. Again, for the majority of human history monarchs were part of the select few that got to consider the philosophy of what it meant to live a good life. With the base of Maslow’s triangle satiated, they had a monopoly on society’s free time, and thus a natural incubator for reflecting. Aurelius’s quotes from his personal meditations, once only bearing a semblance of relatability to a small few, are now fortunately, very relevant for roughly twenty percent of the Human population. So now we’ll take our turn to partake in the pondering of life and Quality. 

In his 2011 book Flourish, Dr. Martin Seligman outlined the PERMA model as a scientifically-backed basic framework for factors of positive psychology that most significantly impact human well-being. So that we’re all on the same page, I’ll provide an outline of the acronym. These factors are all positive, meaning more of each is generally better for overall life satisfaction, though still noting the laws of diminishing returns. The ‘P’ in PERMA stands for positive emotion, usually in the vein of hedonic happiness, or how you are generally feeling hour-to-hour or day-to-day. Most people know about the hedonic treadmill, which is an analogy derived from studies that describe how quickly people's level of hedonic happiness adjusts to (usually materialistic) life changes. The new car or incremental income increase doesn't have as much of a lasting positive impact on your life satisfaction (if it has a positive impact at all) as people predict it will. All of the other pillars of the PERMA model are based on primarily eudaimonic happiness; the type of happiness that is derived from deeper values (often accompanied by struggle and uncomfortability) and compounding habits over years at a time that are less swayed by your more fleeting hedonic state. 

The ‘E’ in the PERMA model stands for engagement. This can be described as feeling deeply focused or in a “flow state”. It’s obviously most convenient for people to get as much engagement as possible from the work they do to financially support themselves. But for those of us that have jobs they would be more than happy to join the “Severance” program for, you can absolutely derive engagement from hobbies. ‘R’ stands for Relationships. This one is about as straight forward as it gets. Humans are inherently social animals and having strong connections with people across the social, professional and family domains will have a positive effect on your life satisfaction. 

‘M’ for meaning, in this context is the feeling of contributing to something greater than yourself. Traditionally most people satisfied this well-being pillar via raising children and/or supporting a family, alongside strong religious and spiritual connections. However, working for a company that deeply aligns with your core values, volunteering, or contributing to anything that you feel is “bigger than yourself” can generate satisfying meaning in one's life. And finally, the ‘A’ in PERMA stands for achievement. Whether big or small, accomplishing goals undoubtedly generates satisfaction in humans. And while goals can be status or extrinsically motivated, these tend to be correlated with fluctuating hedonic happiness. Goals that are intrinsic to your core values and deeper aspirations are more likely to increase your more stable eudaimonic satisfaction. 

There is also one more factor that was later amended to the model– ‘V’ for vitality. Seemingly obvious enough to be added as a footnote, vitality defines your physical health and wellness. The main aspects of vitality such as physical activity, sleep quality, and nutrition are so important to mental wellbeing that the other factors of the acronym shouldn’t be given strong consideration until enough adequate attention has been given to these elements first. Hopefully extreme common knowledge here. 

With the factors of the PERMA-V model laid out, I would like to add my own interpretation through the lens of Quality. Notoriously difficult to define without a contextual anchor, Quality is something you notice more in absentia. Throughout Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, he confronts the definitional dilemma of aesthetic Quality head on. In Chapter 18 he introduces a thought experiment that imagines a world being slowly stripped of Quality. Everything with a natural subjective appeal; from Art to sports and even flavor would be go. Leaving a spartan, essentialist society that wholly prioritizes logical reasoning, hard science and mathematics. 

“The world can function without [Quality], but life would be so dull as to be hardly worth living. The term worth is a Quality term. Life would just be living without any values or purpose at all” (Pirsig 218). 

With the modern luxury of having agency over the idea of what is a life worth living, we can attach the vague concept of Quality to the more concrete foundations of positive psychology. At its core, the PERMA-V model is a blueprint to live a Quality life itself; as it is difficult to imagine any of the six factors being effective for increasing life satisfaction if Quality is absent. This is especially true for the eudaimonic factors, i.e. everything not including positive emotion. Positive emotion can absolutely be affected, for the lack of a better term, “positively” by non-Quality. A night out with people, substances and at a venue of, we’ll say, questionable Quality can obviously elicit very positive emotions… hedonically. The deeper eudaimonic pillars of life satisfaction are conversely intrinsically tied to Quality. While Pirsig’s thought experiment focused largely on the society-wide and materialistic elements of Quality, an equally compelling exercise can be done with positive psychology. Imagine a relationship that you would describe as a distinctly low-Quality. Or a job, a sleep pattern, an ambitious goal, etc. Any of these things with abject quality will have a strong positive correlation to an overall lower life satisfaction, or as another way of putting it: A lower quality of life. I don’t need to describe the positive argument of what quality looks like because of how powerful the negative argument is. Reducing quality to “knowing it when you see it” is both as reductionist as it sounds, but also highly apt. Especially with how Pirsig eventually comes to the conclusion that Quality is not an additional feature of life, but a fundamental element of life in itself. 

Living a good life means also living a quality one. If time is now the bottleneck of the human experience, unfortunately we are currently not able to widen it. Much like how the thousands of generations of Homo sapiens before us couldn’t widen their bottleneck of baseline survival. However, injecting Quality into the time that we have will help the bottleneck flow more smoothly. A commitment to quality, and its compounding eudaimonic benefits, is a commitment to a good life.