Title: "Ingredients for a Good Life? Not on a Faulty System."
By Olivia Jifcovici
The question often floats around in debates, pop culture panels, pseudo-intellectual podcasts:
"What are the ingredients for a good life?"
It sounds innocent. Reflective, even. But no one seems to notice — or they pretend not to — that when the very foundation is wrong, the question cannot yield a truthful or applicable answer.
What do I mean?
I mean this:
If the system in which life unfolds is flawed — structurally unjust, psychologically manipulative, financially parasitic, and socially coercive — then any answer to the question becomes trivial, a cosmetic fix, a performance. The real discussion isn’t being had. The root issues remain buried beneath cycles of subculture, distraction, and denial.
But as a thinking exercise, I will entertain it briefly.
For me, the ingredients of a life worth living begin with sovereignty.
The sovereignty of a woman — not in name, not in role-playing — but in full self-possession, out of debt, outside obedience, and free from infiltration. I forged my own financial path precisely to avoid the merry-go-round of consumer enslavement. That alone changed everything.
I would also include:
Owning my body,
Owning my choices,
Controlling my mental and physical space,
Deciding what I allow in — and what I allow out.
But this becomes almost impossible in a world that projects hate onto those who do not comply, who do not collapse, who do not perform submission. My stand generates friction, because it exposes the lie of this so-called ‘life.’
I continue with this:
Clear boundaries
Social distancing not from disease but from dysfunction
My alone time
The preservation of my creative cadence
The crafting of meaning, beauty, and value in a world where those have been stripped and sold for parts.
The differences, they multiply.
And they matter.
And they remain mostly unspoken in that flawed initial question.
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I am Olivia Jifcovici 