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2:33pm September 28, 2014

mulder-are-you-suggesting:

A week or so ago I was reading a journal article* about a study on autistic adults’ “quality of life” that pointed out that earlier such studies made the mistake of assuming that autistic people wanted the same things as non-autistic people, and that it was better measure of “quality of life” to take into account whether or not autistic people were satisfied with their lives, regardless of whether their lives fit into some kind of “normal” pattern. I remember thinking, “Yeah, good point” — but as I continued to read, it started to occur to me, “But wait a minute, just because someone isn’t satisfied with their life (and who the hell is even satisfied with their life, anyway), that doesn’t mean their life has low quality.” I thought about my own life. I’m generally unsatisfied. I’m generally not a happy person. But do I think my life has low quality? No! Even if my life were a miserable tragedy-fest — which it isn’t — I still think I’d be bothered by the suggestion that I had low quality of life.

I don’t think life has some kind of specific “quality” that can be measured. And I think it’s just such a disgusting, disturbing concept, “quality of life.” It’s also a dangerous concept. People use “but they have such a low quality of life!” as reason for why a disabled person shouldn’t have access to life-saving surgery. Even if a disabled person was mostly unhappy and unsatisfied with their life, even if they hated their disability — the mere fact that they would *want* to have life-saving surgery should tell you that they think their life is worth living. So let’s just get away from this “quality of life” crap, shall we?

*Didn’t save the link to it, sorry.

Yes to all of that.

And it’s not like happiness is necessarily the thing we should all be striving for anyway.

I would rather strive for things like helping other people.  I am a fairly happy person at this point in my life, and that is a nice thing.  And being too unhappy is a bad thing, obviously to be avoided where possible.  But I’m not sure happiness should be how we are measuring lives.

Also a friend of mine said that if you actually want to be truly happy, you actually have to stop caring about your own individual happiness and start caring more about others.  Which sounds paradoxical, but I bet it’s true.  But caring more about others seems like a good idea in general.  Not to the point that you harm yourself (except in specific situations), but just because it’s a good thing to do.