"quality of life – what does it mean?" - new post

I've been thinking lately a lot about the quality of life. My mother recently passed away, and of course my brothers, her family and friends miss her terribly. Without going into great detail, her quality of life went down significantly over the last 10 years, particularly in the last year. She was 90 years old and she lived most of her life at what most people would consider a high level quality. While I don't advocate mercy killing as did the recently departed Dr. Kevorkian, I certainly think it's important for all of us to examine what it means to have a high quality of life. For example, my research shows that most people think first about a country's per capita income when they think of quality of life. But what if a person either doesn't have a great need for money or they have already reached their monetary needs? When a person first begins to think about their career, marriage, being part of the community and so forth, most people in today's world look at something that will make them "happy". I say happy in quotes because everyone knows that there are very few people that can be happy all the time. Actually researchers say that about 10% of all people are happy most of the time, and are that way naturally. In other words no matter what they're doing but they are generally in a cheerful mood. But 10% is certainly not the majority and the other 90% is usually unhappy about the other 10% finding it so easy to be happy. So in other words, I think that quality of life means more than just money. Think about this, a person wrote a book recently about having fun during retirement. That person's research showed correctly that almost every book written about retirement is about having enough money to retire. But when I speak to people in their 50s and 60s who have sold their business for enough money to retire on while they are still healthy, many of them find their lives going downhill quickly. So there's a lot more to retiring successfully then just having enough money. My firm does family law and estate planning, and we are also looking at offering life quality planning™, or quality-of-life planning™. That is because we find that estate planning primarily deals with the money aspects of life and death, but almost no one is dealing with the quality of life that we want as we grow older. And most people don't start thinking about estate planning, including wills and trusts and so forth until they're in their 50s or 60s. Experts often say everyone should have a will especially when they first have children. But most people don't do their wills until later in life, and by then they haven't figured out a way to execute a good plan to have a good life quality. And of course, because they're in their 50s or 60s it is a lot more difficult to begin having a good quality of life – they have been living life in a different way. Of course this is separate and apart from a person who has a high quality of life, and then it goes down as a result of monetary loss, old age and illness. Where does quality of life begin, where does life quality planning begin? I think it begins with integrity. I think it begins with having moral courage to do what we know is right. There are a lot of situations that arise where we cannot be sure what the right answer is but in most situations most of us at least know what the wrong answer is. And I have never met a person whose integrity is often questioned who seemed happy to me. Conversely almost every happy person I have met did seem to have integrity and what I will refer to as moral courage. I define moral courage as the courage to stand up for things most of us know to be right, when most of us turn our backs when others around us are doing what we know to be wrong.