I was bored this morning. While being bored I devised a little formula that expresses how stable (or, perhaps, how boring) your life is and I’m curious about others’ scores.
So, add up:
*How many years you have been in a committed relationship
*How many years you have been at your current job
*How many years you have lived at the same address
Note: Each answer must consider only current, unbroken periods. If you worked at your job for 5 years, left for 1, then came back for 6 more, your score is 6 (not 11).
Take your total years and divide by your age in years. This is your LSS.
Interesting exercise. Mine gets dinged because I’m less than a year in my current job (and have been in 4 different jobs in the past 7 years, due to being caught in two different corporate downsizings / layoffs, and spending 2 years as a freelancer).
Relationship: 27 years
Job: 1 year
Address: 21 years
I’m at either 0.071 or 0.38, depending on how one counts being on sabbatical and living in my wife’s US apartment while renting out my Norwegian domicile.
I get 1.14. I have been thinking about making some changes that could affect that, however. This is an interesting way to quantify things - I wonder how it can be used in conjunction with some other measure of, say, happiness, or monetary wealth.
33/Age: 37 = 0.89
Probably fairly stable compared others of my age group, but not in the same ballpark as some.
Out of curiosity I wondered what a realistically high number for this could be. So let’s make some assumptions:
Age = X
Maximum Relationship Length = For most people let’s assume high school sweethearts is the earliest you could have what you would call a relationship–so we’ll say the earliest your relationship can start is X-15.
Job = Again, there are exceptions, but generally nobody will start a job that is a lifelong career before 18 so let’s say X-18 is the longest job you can have.
Address = Conceivably could live in the same house you were raised in, so X is the maximum address age. What do we get?
[(X-15)+(X-18)+X]/X
(3X-33)/X is the realistic maximum, and that only works up until you retire. So based on those numbers and life expectancy, I’d say any score 2.5 or higher would be about the highest you can find in the real world. Just for a point of comparison to how we’re doing.
My farm-raised grandfather would have scored over 2.5 at his highest (80/60/60-80 depending on when you count his farm job/life starting), although I think that would be hard to reach in this era.
Depends on how to implement the first clause. I’ve been in three committed ongoing relationships for quite some time now —do I use the sum, or the single longest span?
version 1: (7+7+7)+6+4 = 31 / 59 = 0.525
version 2: 7+6+4 =17/55 = 17/ 59 = 0.288
Interesting idea, but how do you count freelancers? I’ve “been at my current job” for 15 years, but that’s with a different employer every time and intermittent periods of unemployment. I have a feeling that alone will kill my stability score…
Relationship: 18 years
Job: 1 year
House: 1.5 years
Age: 44 years
0.47
I do change jobs a lot, and we have moved a lot. I hope our period of frequent moves has come to an end. I ill probably be a job-hopper for the rest of my career, or until I stop getting rewarded for changing jobs.
