A good life
Twelve positions on what a life that went well would contain, and four questions only you read.
- Questions
- 40
- 12 min
- Twelve positions and four open questions — nothing scored
What this is
There is no instrument behind this one and there does not need to be. The wellbeing literature — hedonic and eudaimonic accounts, Ryff's six dimensions, self-determination theory's three needs, Seligman's PERMA, the OECD's eleven domains — was read only as a checklist of what a life is usually said to contain, and nothing was taken from any of it; those questionnaires belong to their authors, several of them require written permission, and none of them is reproduced or paraphrased here. One old and public idea is used as a frame rather than as a checklist: that work can be held as a job, a career or a calling. The research questionnaire built on that idea is not used and not paraphrased. The one place research shaped a question rather than a checklist is the last closed block, which asks what you would regret not doing rather than what you would regret doing, following the finding that regrets of inaction outlast regrets of action over a lifetime — replicated since, with weaker effects and not in every study, so read it as a reason for the question's direction rather than as a fact about you. The four questions at the end have no options at all and never leave this device. Nothing on this page is scored, banded, or set against anybody else's answers. What comes back is what you said, in the order of the weight you put on it, which is why the reasons you write are worth more than the options you tick.
Where it comes from
written down, not impliedTwelve positions and four open questions — nothing scored
Wellbeing research — Ryff's six dimensions, self-determination theory, Seligman's PERMA, the OECD's Better Life domains — was used only as a checklist of what a good life can include. No item from any wellbeing scale is used.
Written for this app
Nothing here is measured, so reliability and validity do not apply. It records the positions you state, how much each matters to you, and why.
Further reading
- Ryff, C. D. (1989). Happiness is everything, or is it? Explorations on the meaning of psychological well-being (opens in a new tab). Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 57(6), 1069–1081original source
- Ryan, R. M., & Deci, E. L. (2000). Self-determination theory and the facilitation of intrinsic motivation, social development, and well-being (opens in a new tab). American Psychologist, 55(1), 68–78original source
- Gilovich, T., & Medvec, V. H. (1994). The temporal pattern to the experience of regret (opens in a new tab). Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 67(3), 357–365original source
Read the result as a structured version of what you said, not as a measurement of you.
Why these questions carry no evidence
Every questionnaire in this app writes its own items, because the framework behind an instrument is usually public while the published questionnaire is copyrighted. That is the honest way to build it and it has a cost worth stating plainly: reliability and validity belong to a specific set of questions given to a specific group of people, not to the name of the idea behind them. These questions have never been given to a sample, have no norms, and have no evidence that they measure what they are named after.