From Peter Voss: "What is Optimal Living? It comprises long term physical and emotional health, fulfillment, and happiness; not wasting our lives on irrelevant or unpleasant tasks. How much time do we spend on sub-optimal activities? If our work is not a pleasure, we are off to a bad start: We probably spend at least 50% (55 hrs/week) of our total waking lives preparing, commuting and working, and that’s not even counting time wasted vegetating away because of stress, frustration and exhaustion. Most of us spend at least another 20% (22 hrs/week) of our waking lives on other tasks which we regard as necessary evils rather than pleasures. These may include shopping, cleaning, cooking, laundry, gym, fixing things, doing taxes and other red-tape, and filling ‘social obligations’.
Have you ever done an audit of your actual life? How much of our lives do we waste with people we don’t really like; or in relationships which are far from optimal? What percentage of your time do you spend doing things you want to do, rather than have to? What is our LQ (Living Quotient)? How can we get from 30% to 60% or 40% to 80% (effectively adding maybe 30 years to our lives), or even from 10% to 90% (does 10% even qualify as living)? Fortunately, many of us enjoy our work most of the time, but is it optimal? What would we do if we could wave a magic wand?
There are no magic wands. But, we have something almost as good: intellect, knowledge, freewill. We just need to learn how to weave them in just the right way.
Responsibility for our lives must neither be abdicated to the future nor to others. The priority is to do an audit of our lives: how we spend our time and money, our physical and mental health, our long and short-term goals, our strategies for achieving them, plus a review of technology (including philosophical and psychological) used to help achieve our goals. Are we satisfied with our time utilization? Are we happy with our financial plans? How do we break out of the mental prisons which hold us back? Let’s carefully review our options and overcome the limits within ourselves. Let’s make sure that we squeeze the last drops out of any technology that may promote our goals. Let’s not waste the next 20 or 50 years just fantasizing about the future. Let’s take charge – today. Order from chaos, now."