Feel It, Don’t Count It

Achieving more happiness by moving from a quantitative to a qualitative mindset

Our American culture is obsessed with counting as are most Western cultures. We count just about everything. Money. Personal and business achievements. Education accomplishments. Possessions. Sports scores. All sorts of things.

What we don’t count in specific amounts, we judge based on a scale that is essentially counting. How attractive is someone? How prestigious is a job? What is the social class level of a new acquaintance? These are all ways to count things in order to assign value to them.

I contend that this is not the way to live if you want to be happiest.

In Moving Toward A Qualitative Life Peter Himmelman alludes to our frequent propensity to aim for quantity over quality.

That is the nature of living a quantitative life, as opposed to a qualitative one. The former is about ‘high numbers’, the latter looks for ‘deep values’.

Qualitative living is indeed about honoring deep values, the values that drive us from our core.

Rather than count things (quantitative thinking), I propose another perspective on living by instead placing more emphasis on the actual experience and how something feels (qualitative thinking).