How Do You Measure Your Life?

A comment by a respected reader got me thinking about how each of us judges our life. If we think about it at all, that is. Many of us just go through life without much of a vision as to how we want to live each day. Before we know it, the end of life looms and then we panic and ask ourselves what the meaning of our life was.

Take a minute today to ask yourself how you measure your life. Only then will you know how you want to live, and can begin now to create a life of meaning. I’ve covered six possibilities in this post. The first three are more commonly used, but I urge you to seriously consider adopting one of the last three as these are more meaningful.

I still think we are afraid to die because we are still trying to figure out how to measure our lives. In years? In achievements? In friends? In popularity? The thing is we cannot know if our life has been worthwhile until we figure out how to measure it.

- Fr David (see original comment)

1. Chronological age

The most common measurement of life is chronological age, and people can become famous simply by living long enough. Examples include Mariam Amash at 122 years Edna Parker at 115 years.

Living a long life is considered an achievement, which no doubt it is. Societies are considered more developed if the lifespan of their members is longer. One reason Africa is pitied by the rest of the world is the short lifespan of most of the population.

Striving to live a longer life has much of the modern world exercising more, taking supplements, watching their diet, and generally trying to live a healthy lifestyle. This is great, of course. Yet we intuitively know that there must be more to life than this. Surely the only reason to want to live longer is to give ourselves time to do the things that truly matter.

It’s not the years in your life that count. It’s the life in your years.

- Abraham Lincoln

2. Material wealth

Although not many will openly admit to this, many people measure success by the size of their house, their car, their paychecks, and their bank accounts. We envy those who make it to the list of wealthiest people, and secretly wish we had a share of some of the wealth even as we declare that money does not bring happiness and so on.

There is nothing wrong with being materially well off. When you do your job or run your business well and provide goods and services that benefit others, you will generally be rewarded financially. This is right and fair. Material wealth, when earned, is a useful unit of measurement of your effort and contribution.

It’s when we start to use this as the sole yardstick of a successful life that things become a little skewed. You probably know of people who look down on those who are not as rich as themselves, and perhaps even treat them with less respect than they would someone who was better off. This is how you know that material wealth has become your main measure of life.

Material abundance without character is the path to destruction.

- Thomas Jefferson

3. Achievements

There are many whose lives were brief and yet made a huge impact on the world. Anne Frank (died at 15), John Keats (died at 25), and Jesus Christ (died at 33) come to mind. The world remembers them for who they were and what they did.

A life spent worthily should be measured by deeds, not years.

- R B Sheridan

Measuring a life by achievements results in some people displaying the trophies and medals they have won in sports. These are visual reminders that you have done something worth doing. Some consider fame an achievement as well, and will frame newspaper clippings of themselves or their achievements.

The desire to achieve drives some men (and women) to spend long hours at work to scale the corporate ladder; leads scientists to spend devote years of their lives researching a specialised niche in order to achieve a breakthrough; and enables athletes to punish their bodies beyond belief to gain the recognition of being best in their field.

We should certainly strive to do something useful with our time on earth. At the same time, there is more to life than what you achieve. We are human beings, not human doings.

4. Legacy

Some homes are filled with family photographs as a powerful reminder that you have a created a family. For some, this is their life work – to raise a child, to leave behind a family when you’re gone. When you speak to the dying, you know that they find great comfort in knowing that although they will soon be no more, they have left something behind that will outlive them.

The great use of life is to spend it on something that will outlast it.

- James Truslow Adam

A prime example of a legacy is the Nobel Prize bequeathed to the world by Alfred Nobel. He had read a mistaken orbituary of himself which mentioned the invention of dynamite as his main achievement. Nobel decided that he wanted to leave the world a legacy of peace and contribution, not the legacy of death. Hence his Nobel Foundation which inspires so much good work today.

We can’t all be Alfred Nobel, but we can decide what kind of legacy we want to leave. Perhaps you will raise a happy child who will make a difference to the world as an adult. Or you may build a company or organisation that will carry on the work you started even after you step away from the helm. Your legacy could simply be a memory in others’ minds of the kind of person you were, as a role model for their own lives.

To leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch, or a redeemed social condition; to know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded.

- Ralph Waldo Emerson

5. Personal creed

You can decide your own measure of success in a personal creed and live by this every day of your life. I strongly recommend this as we are all created different and are on earth to fulfil our individual purpose. Your life has a meaning that no other life has, and you alone can decide what living well means for you.

Creeds that are poetic and inspiring include Edgar Albert Guest’s My Creed, and Rudyard Kipling’s If. If you like music and find that lyrics pull at your heartstrings more strongly than prose or verse, a good example of a creed in song is Ronan Keating’s If Tomorrow Never Comes.

You can adopt one of these as your own creed, or develop one yourself. Yours will probably be more simple. Or it could be very long and detailed. What matters is that it is yours. This is your definition of what your life is about, and it does not and should not matter if anyone else approves of it or likes it.

By this measure of life, you should read your personal creed at the end of every day and ask if you have lived by those guidelines. A day well-lived is when you can say “Yes!” and go to sleep knowing that another page of your life story has been written. The days of your life will then add up to a story you can be proud of.

There is not one big cosmic meaning for all; there is only the meaning we each give to our life, an individual meaning, an individual plot, like an individual novel, a book for each person.

- Anais Nin

6. Transcend measurement

There are two ways to think about life – as an obligation, or as pure gift. If you regard life as an obligation, like a job where you are put in a certain position to perform a certain function, you will need to measure how well you are performing.

Life as pure gift does not need to be measured at all. It just is. You just are. You could do nothing with your life and it would still mean something, because you existed and that is good enough. In philosophical terms, existence is not a means but an end in itself. “I AM” is the only meaning there is.

Lo, blessed are our ears for they have heard;
Yea, blessed are our eyes for they have seen:
Let the thunder break on man and beast and bird
And the lightning. It is something to have been.

- G.K.Chesterton

Of course, one of life’s paradoxes is that it can be a bit of both. It is a gift, but we also want to use this gift in a meaningful way. Each day you wake up and find yourself alive is a gift, but you can also choose to make that day count. Whatever measure you choose, live well, and your life will mean something.

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