The Good Life as defined by the Bubble Generation
The economy we have today will let you chow down on a supersize McBurger, check stock quotes on your latest smartphone, and drive your giant SUV down the block to buy a McMansion on hypercredit. It's a vision of the good life that many aspire which the noted economist Amartya Sen termed as hedonic opulence. And it's a conception built in and for the industrial age, about buying and having more and more. Â Based on this perspective, it prompts us to the question: Is a well lived life worth anything?
This is in total contast to the other vison of maybe cooking a fine meal at a right-sized eco-home, to be accompanied by local, award-winning microbrewed beer your friends have brought over, and then walking back to the vegetable garden to pick some of the vegetables you have grown and use it in the dinner preparation. That's an alternate vision of meaningfully well-lived life, what the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle termed eudaimonia, can be meant as âhappinessâ or âflourishingâ and also as âwell-beingâ. It highlights a concept  called eudaimonic prosperity, and it's about living meaningfully well. Its purpose is not merely passive consuming but living i.e. doing, achieving, fulfilling, becoming, inspiring, transcending, creating, accomplishing â all the stuff that matters the most in all our lives.
We live in an era where all that matters is people with supersized egos eyeing to be on Forbes who is the richest in the world list, an era defined as the bubble generation.Â
Renowned psychologist Abraham Maslow wrote in 1943 about hierarchy of human human needs in the classic - A Theory of Human Motivation, here is an excerpt:
It is quite true that man lives by bread alone - when there is no bread. But what happens to man's desires when there is plenty of bread and when his belly is chronically filled?
Which picture does your current or aspired life fit into?