A metric to judge prosperity

Prosperity is often confused with wealth. But wealth, at least in the traditional sense, is only its enabler. A certain amount of it is necessary, but no amount of it is sufficient.

I define prosperity as the extent of your ability to do things for their own sake, and not solely as a means to an end.

In other words, prosperity is a measure of the freedom to pursue your hobbies.

At a societal level, judging prosperity would involve calculating the percentage of a population's cumulative waking hours spent pursuing its hobbies. And yes, it would be impossible to measure. Although, if it weren't, I'm certain we'd be surprised with the results. Most rich people wouldn't be prosperous. And the people we consider poor would outperform our expectations.

At an individual level though, this metric is trivial to track, and in my opinion – worth maximising.