Arrache-moi la tête

For the past 7 years, I have been looking for the right lenses to assess how satisfied I am with my life. I tried multiple frameworks, and ended creating my own version, tweaking it along the way. It has remained stable for 4 years now, so I guess it’s solid enough for me to share it.

I look at my life through 5 dimensions: Mind, Heart, Body, Soul, Liquid.

Definitions

Mind = what stimulate my intellect (professional challenges, entertainment, etc.)

Heart = the core nucleus of my family (wife, kids and me)

Body = what makes me healthy (sleep, exercise, nutrition, etc.)

Soul = all interactions with human beings (friends, wider family, colleagues, etc.)

Liquid = anything that helps support the other four (money, habits, time, etc.)

Definitions rationale

The idea behind this split is to force myself to look at the underlying motivation behind my most frequent activities. A classic way of looking at one’s life is the following: Work, Family, Friends, Health. It looks very similar to my split, but the small differences are deliberate. For example, I don’t have a Work category. I assess my current job along three dimensions:

• Is my job nourishing me intellectually? (Mind)
• Is my job making me interact with good people? (Soul)
• Is my job providing me enough money and time? (Liquid)

I’m not optimizing for Work in itself. I’m optimizing for underlying dimensions, and my job is only one way to fulfill them. If I change job and my new job generates less opportunities to interact with interesting colleagues, I may compensate that by spending more time with friends.