In his novel One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Alexander Solzhenitsyn drew on his own experience to describe life in a Soviet prison camp in the Arctic. This involved almost unimaginable suffering: imprisoned without any prospect of release for what would not be a crime in any reasonably free society; forced to work long hours in subzero temperatures; appalling food and accommodation; and a probable early death from illness, exhaustion, or murder by the guards. Yet the hero of the book looks back on his day with some satisfaction:
“Shukhov went to sleep fully content. He’d had many strokes of luck that day: they hadn’t put him in the cells; they hadn’t sent the team to the settlement; he’d pinched a bowl of kasha at dinner; the team-leader had fixed the rates well; he’d built a wall and enjoyed doing it; he’d smuggled that bit of hacksaw blade through; he’d earned something from Tsezar in the evening; he’d bought that tobacco. And he hadn’t fallen ill. He’d got over it. A day without a dark cloud. Almost a happy day” (pp142-143).
This extract tells us something about how people assess the quality of their own lives. Almost everybody would rate the life of Ivan Denisovich Shukhov in the most negative terms, even compared with that of ordinary citizens of the Soviet Union at that time. Yet he had adapted to his way of life, and was able to win sufficient minor triumphs over adversity to regard it as ‘almost a happy day’. There is therefore sometimes a difference between a person’s quality of life rated by an observer, and that person’s own sense of well-being.
Researchers call the first of these an ‘objective measure’ of quality of life, compared with a person self-rating, which is termed ’subjective’. But these phrases are misleading because ‘objective’ measures are simply the subjective assessments of others about what constitutes the good life. Researchers may poll lots of people in a particular society about what they wish from life and hence obtain some numerical score for quality of life, but in the end they are just measuring the extent to which a particular individual conforms to other people’s subjective assessments of what makes them happy. Needless to say, some people willingly choose a way of life that would not appeal to all of us - as monks spending a spartan life of prayer, as soldiers living in barracks facing daily danger, and so on.
Of course, Ivan Denisovich Shukhov did not choose to be in a gulag, but his life there had narrowed his awareness of the alternatives. This may have been essential for psychological survival, but would also have made adaptation after release particularly difficult. Like Brooks, the elderly released prisoner in The Shawshank Redemption, suicide would have seemed a reasonable option. This raises questions about whether we should give preference to people’s own assessments of their preferred way of life over that of ‘objective’ opinion. This already happens routinely when the person in question is deemed unable to make a rational decision because of childhood, mental illness or severe learning disability. But none of us ever make a rational decision about what we wish from life, in the sense of considering and weighing all the possible alternatives. Instead, most of us choose between the limited range of alternatives we know about or just copy what other people do, while a few reckless souls leap into the unknown.
Does this mean that most of us are living in a gulag of our own making? For some people, this is true. It is possible to meet people who live narrow and restricted lives without poetry, the excitement of sport and the stimulation of friendship and good conversation. This can happen even when there are the financial means to live otherwise. My advice for escaping from such a gulag is to travel to new places when you can, try out new foods, learn new languages, make an effort to meet different kinds of people, read more and watch less television.
Read: Solzhenitsyn A (1963) One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. Penguin, Harmondsworth.
See also:
Looking down on others' needs
“Shukhov went to sleep fully content. He’d had many strokes of luck that day: they hadn’t put him in the cells; they hadn’t sent the team to the settlement; he’d pinched a bowl of kasha at dinner; the team-leader had fixed the rates well; he’d built a wall and enjoyed doing it; he’d smuggled that bit of hacksaw blade through; he’d earned something from Tsezar in the evening; he’d bought that tobacco. And he hadn’t fallen ill. He’d got over it. A day without a dark cloud. Almost a happy day” (pp142-143).
This extract tells us something about how people assess the quality of their own lives. Almost everybody would rate the life of Ivan Denisovich Shukhov in the most negative terms, even compared with that of ordinary citizens of the Soviet Union at that time. Yet he had adapted to his way of life, and was able to win sufficient minor triumphs over adversity to regard it as ‘almost a happy day’. There is therefore sometimes a difference between a person’s quality of life rated by an observer, and that person’s own sense of well-being.
Researchers call the first of these an ‘objective measure’ of quality of life, compared with a person self-rating, which is termed ’subjective’. But these phrases are misleading because ‘objective’ measures are simply the subjective assessments of others about what constitutes the good life. Researchers may poll lots of people in a particular society about what they wish from life and hence obtain some numerical score for quality of life, but in the end they are just measuring the extent to which a particular individual conforms to other people’s subjective assessments of what makes them happy. Needless to say, some people willingly choose a way of life that would not appeal to all of us - as monks spending a spartan life of prayer, as soldiers living in barracks facing daily danger, and so on.
Of course, Ivan Denisovich Shukhov did not choose to be in a gulag, but his life there had narrowed his awareness of the alternatives. This may have been essential for psychological survival, but would also have made adaptation after release particularly difficult. Like Brooks, the elderly released prisoner in The Shawshank Redemption, suicide would have seemed a reasonable option. This raises questions about whether we should give preference to people’s own assessments of their preferred way of life over that of ‘objective’ opinion. This already happens routinely when the person in question is deemed unable to make a rational decision because of childhood, mental illness or severe learning disability. But none of us ever make a rational decision about what we wish from life, in the sense of considering and weighing all the possible alternatives. Instead, most of us choose between the limited range of alternatives we know about or just copy what other people do, while a few reckless souls leap into the unknown.
Does this mean that most of us are living in a gulag of our own making? For some people, this is true. It is possible to meet people who live narrow and restricted lives without poetry, the excitement of sport and the stimulation of friendship and good conversation. This can happen even when there are the financial means to live otherwise. My advice for escaping from such a gulag is to travel to new places when you can, try out new foods, learn new languages, make an effort to meet different kinds of people, read more and watch less television.
Read: Solzhenitsyn A (1963) One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. Penguin, Harmondsworth.
See also:
Looking down on others' needs
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