Where in the World

Trying to find one's place in the world is one of the hardest things some of us ever do.  It's more than just trying to find the right major in college, and then changing it a year later. It has to do with what each of feels we need to be happy, or at least content. What we're passionate about, what makes us feel desire, what nightmares play through our head after we shut our eyes just before we drift off to dreamland, and what lessens those nightmares.  Friends may come and go along the way, feeding different desires and fear as they do, and will ultimately impact where we finally fall among they great many possible routs our lives could have taken. Some forget, you always have more power than anyone else at controlling how happy you are with where you are, and if you are not happy with where you are, you can always move.

I'll invent something to help discuss and measure how well people feel with what is happening in their lives; I'll call it the contentness factor (referred to as CF).  This value is controlled my many variables, but in essence it represents how close people are to where they want to be. 

Example: For someone who is whole-heartedly bend on becoming a veterinarian, getting accepted into a good vet school would probably increase the CF, while failing to be accepted would decrease the CF.  The same person might have a higher CF in vet school than in pre-med because they are close to the final goal; however, if the person was very content just to be doing everything he could to be a vet, then his CF in pre-med may have been just as high.

Certainly one's career is one of the many variables the affect the CF.  Personal image may be another. Social life, popularity, fitness, financial strength, sex life, companionship, education... the list goes on as long as there topics that influence people feelings.

Now we can make a cute little equation. We'll say each of these variables is actually a sub-factor of the CF. So, we can say that the variable that represents one's career is CF_career.  Each of the variables can be assigned a sub-CF in the same manner. So, in abstract we have variables CF_a, CF_b, CF_c, CF_d, CF_e, etc. The sum or these we'll say equals the infamous CF.  Just for you people who like symbols:

CF_SUM = CF_a + CF_b + CF_c + CF_d + CF_e + ...

or maybe the average would be more accurate so that additional factors would not greatly affect the CF. After all it's the average of all of the things in your life that make you're overall feelings, not the number of things in your life.

CF_AVG = (CF_a + CF_b + CF_c + CF_d + CF_e + ...) / n

but what if popularity and fitness aren't as important to you as your education, but you'd still rather be fit than popular.   If you think education is twice as important as popularity, we could give it a coefficient of 2.  Fitness might then get a coefficient of 1.2.  So, we'll ad coefficients to the equation, making sure that it won't artificially inflate the CF.

CF_AVG = (aCF_a + bCF_b + cCF_c + dCF_d + eCF_e + ...) / (a + b + c + d + e + ...)

Just to review incase you didn't follow, the variable a, b, c, d, and e represent the relative imortance an individual feels toward each sub-CF, denoted CF_a, CF_b, CF_c, CF_d, and CF_e.  Each sub-CF is just how satisfied (or content) a person is with some aspect of their life. We can express it as a fraction, between 0 and 1.  If my formula is right, the CF (or CF_AVG in the equation) would be a value between 0 and 1 that rated how contend people were with where they were in their life, 1 being perfectly content, and 0 being completely unsatisfied.