In the previous insight we concluded by mentioning there is a difference of "standard of living" compared to "quality of life". Both are measures used supposedly to assess how society is doin', but one has significantly more depth than the other and the actual difference between the two is everything.
"Standard of Living" refers primarily to economic factors and thus the machine levers of commerce and man made material conditions and can be defined as "the amount of goods and services people can buy with the money they have". This is relatively objective and within shallow and not very good economic speak, only include superficial things such as employment opportunities, assets & liabilities, and thus, level of wealth, and accumulation of material goods and services. With corpo robots claiming that the main metric to measure how to tell if a civilization is doing well is its Gross Domestic Product. Yet, one can not buy happiness.
The wife and I once visited some friends on the East Coast who are both ER docs who are both partners within their hospital system. They work all the time, probably make a combined $900,000+ per year and they have one of those Virginia McMansion 5000 square foot houses with complex roof angles and by previously said economic measurements are doing top notch. They buy their kids nearly anything they want and as a result their house is full to the brim with toys such as literal arcade games including one of those arcade basketball throwing things. Both the giant basement and 3 car garage which they can't park their cars in are so full of stuff they're heading to hoarder territory and a general underlying anxiety is heavy when visiting their personal spaces. They obviously have over-spending problems, making them and their kids lite slaves to marketing and commercialism, and are a prime example that above a certain point, one does not need more stuff cause access and availability of goods also quickly means "stuff that fills up storage lockers" and maintaining that type of standard of living is a time drain.
"Quality of life" is a broader concept that includes not only and exclusively made by man material things, which do have some importance, but also goes deeper to include non made by man but more individual or better said subjective general well-being and personal fulfillment beyond just economic metrics. Basically, how are you really doing not just physically, mentally, but also spiritually. In your safety and security, work-life balance, satisfaction, pursuing passions, access to cultural, social, and recreational opportunities, freedom, liberty, human rights, leisure time, the pursuit of happiness, and we would say most importantly, ability to work on one's personal development and balance within a natural environment. These are all things that the empire hates and works to slow or stop in the individual.
A country might have a high standard of living - high relative incomes, modern infrastructure, and social services such as health care (which when overly privatized becomes sick don't care) that are available to a population. Which are certainly not un-important, but at the same time those with access to such things can have a lower quality of life if there is over materialism, rat race time sucking, widespread disinformation, oppression, sub-par environmental conditions, and still massive mis-distribution of wealth. Conversely, a simpler lifestyle in a country with a lower standard of living may result in a higher quality of life due to community ties, cultural richness, or environmental sustainability or resilience. Thus, quality of life is in no way directly correlated to standard of living. As it's really up to the community's mindsets outside of economic factors. So both concepts are useful for understanding societal development but serve different analytical purposes. With "standard of living" capturing only material conditions, while "quality of life" diving into the broader experience of human existence.
And regardless of how much money you have, all of it in the world or none of it at all, it's really all about the physical, mental, and thus spiritual health of your community. So you could be a rich kid of Instagram D-bag whose materially rich as shit but actually has a not very good quality of life cause your hollow dad is away 95% and loves is work way more than his family, your plastic mother whose had half a dozen augmentations on her face and tits is a drunk, and everyone else in your life is ultra selfish, superficial, and shallow like the real housewives of Orange County and you have little to no real friends cause all you want to do is upload escape into mass multiplayer video games to get away from it all. On this same note, see the documentary "The Queen of Versailles" for a worse case scenario of this. Or you could live in a favela in Mexico or Costa Rica and while technically being considered economically poor, reside in a cinder block hut with dirt floors and chickens free ranging through your living room, but still have a very loving family and quite good community, thus have a higher quality of life.
Finally, if you're playing Niles' bingo, the word balance will absolutely be on there, and since Standard of Living & Quality of Life are closely correlated but also somewhat inversely correlated, a center balance of this spectrum is where most of us want to land. Without sharing living spaces with livestock or living in a Queen of Versailles 1800,000 square foot house, but instead realistically somewhere way more toward the former or middle.