I keep trying to figure out how to measure “how good is your life.” (e.g. here, here, here.) My current best idea is: your life is good iff¹ you want more of it; your life is bad iff you want less of it.

So instead of rating your life (or day, week, month) on a scale where “1 is bad and 10 is good and everyone will always say 7”, we can go from -5 to 5. 0 means “if I knew tomorrow would be as good as today, I would be indifferent about living it vs. magically fast-forwarding through it.” +1 means “I would rather live that day than fast-forward”, -1 means “I would rather fast forward. And then beyond that, we can measure how good or bad those days are by what you would give up to live or not live them.

How do we measure what you’d give up? Can’t be money/possessions, or human connections, or whatever, because those are all different for different people. But we all start life with the same amount of time. So I propose: +2 means “I’d give up one day of my life, e.g. die one day sooner, in order to live this day.” -2 means “I’d give up a day of my life to avoid living this day.” Then it’s roughly exponential: maybe +3 is “I’d give up 2 days”, +4 is “I’d give up 4 days”, +5 is “I’d give up 8 days”, and similarly for the negatives. (I guess the scale goes on to +6, +7, and beyond, though they’d be pretty rare)

But there’s a problem with this: as your life gets consistently better, the days you’re giving up get better too. If my days were all +5, I’d never give up 8 days of my +5 life to live a +5 day!

Hmm, back to the drawing board. I do like the concept that you’ve got to compare to something, otherwise you just get “+3 is really good, +4 is super duper good, +5 is incredibly amazing” and everyone will converge on +3 again.

(Money’s pretty natural, and maybe it’s decent within a short period of time: “would you pay $100 or $1000 to live this day again?” can compare today vs last week or last month. But you can’t compare your current $1000 day as a professional (very very good!) to a $1000 day when you were a poor student (has to be the best day ever!), and you can’t compare across people.)