Types / Five pillars / Outlook on life
One part of life
Outlook on life
A way of seeing life, religious or not, that helps you through hard times
What Outlook on life covers
Outlook on life covers the ideas, commitments, or beliefs that give a person a way to understand life and live through difficult periods. It can be religious or not. It belongs in this check-in because a way of seeing life was one of the five areas in Carl Jung’s view of a happy life, shared in a 1960 newspaper interview. That’s one thinker’s view, not a proven recipe, and the check-in makes no judgment about which outlook someone holds.
The questions ask whether someone’s way of seeing life helps them through hard times, how worthwhile the things they do feel, and how satisfied they are with this part. They also ask how much it matters. One question comes from the Office for National Statistics, and two were written for this site. No licensed measure exists for this pillar, so the result is a prompt for reflection rather than a verdict on anyone’s beliefs. An optional set of nine faith questions can be skipped.
What it leaves out
We couldn’t find a licensed assessment for this pillar, so it leans on one ONS question and two of our own. Treat the report as a prompt for reflection, not a verdict about your beliefs or your life.
Where the questions come from
For Outlook on life, each card below gives the credit for the questions that organization asks, printed word for word.
Office for National Statistics (ONS)
Personal well-being questions from the Office for National Statistics (ONS). Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.
the International Personality Item Pool
Statements adapted from the International Personality Item Pool (ipip.ori.org), which is in the public domain.
Nomigram
Our own questions. They haven’t been validated yet.
None of the organizations named here endorses this site or its check-in.
The other four parts
See all five →-
Health
Your body and mind, and how they’ve been doing lately
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Relationships
The people closest to you—family, friends, a partner, or chosen family
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Beauty
Art, music, and nature—and how much of them reaches your life
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Money and work
A reasonable standard of living, and work that satisfies you—paid or unpaid
Make room for a closer look
51 questions give each part its own place, including the distance between what matters and how life is going.
Questions
Is there one overall score?
No, on purpose. Each part is shown on its own, and how much something matters is never multiplied by or added to how it’s going. The Office for National Statistics says even its own four questions must not be added together.
Should someone take it more than once?
Yes, that’s what it is for. It reads a moment, so the same questions a few months later can show what moved. A retake within a year asks 41 questions instead of 51, because the 10 statements about art and beauty are asked once a year.
Which questions are ours?
Most questions come from a government survey or a published scale, and they’re used word for word. The satisfaction and importance questions are ours, as are the outlook questions, and they’re marked wherever their answers show because they haven’t been validated. That’s the difference between an established measure and an experiment.