Person to Person: Change Your Life and Fix the World

by Joeri Torfs, Pim Ampe

Overview

What if we could step out of the culture of blame and victimhood into a reality that gave us freedom and agency to pursue our dreams? What if there was a way out of the isolation and polarization that so many of us find ourselves in, toward authentic connections with others, across all divisions and borders? What if we lived in a world that revolved around quality of life, rather than economic winners and losers? In Person to Person, Joeri Torfs and Pim Ampe describe this world and chart a clear path toward it. Grounded in research and rooted in reality, the world they describe is neither a utopia nor a fantasy. Person to Person presents an environment that incentivizes goodness, fairness, sustainability, and freedom. It begins with the individual and moves toward our collaborative relationships. Finally, Person to Person proposes a financial environment that would enable this Quality of Life world to flourish—one that is already underway. Alongside the book's theory, we meet Jake, Leon, Lana, and Alex: four fictional college students who illustrate the Person to Person concepts as they interact in their dorm rooms and on campus. Their narratives remind readers that all of us—in spite of our pitfalls, in view of our potential—have the power to make a better world that is richly satisfying, deeply connected, and truly free.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781544529172
Publisher:	Quality of Life World Publishing
Publication date:	04/05/2022
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	492
File size:	5 MB

About the Author

Joeri Torfs has spent his career as an entrepreneur, software developer, and enterprise architect, building structure from chaos and regularly challenging the status quo. He is driven by knowledge and learning and advocates freedom, self-agency, and sustainable collaboration.

Pim Ampe is a therapist with extensive experience in the mental health and welfare sector. She works in a variety of therapeutic positions, specializing in dialectical behavioral therapy and solution-focused therapy, as well as serving as a prosocial facilitator. Pim's life's purpose is to help people increase their quality of life by expanding their ability to adapt and self-manage in the face of life's challenges.

Editorial Reviews

2022-05-26
A new paradigm for personal and social reinvention.

“Many of us have felt boxed in at one point or another,” Torfs and Ampe write in what will strike most readers as an effective note of empathy, “by crippling debt, or a toxic boss, or a bank that didn’t endorse our business plan.” These frustrations have only been heightened by technology and social media. To combat (and subvert) these habits, their guide examines the ways people typically form personal and social relationships and illustrates advice for these scenarios via a series of hypothetical characters, like 19-year-old college student Jake, who faces the typical dilemmas of impending graduation. In his case, one facet of the solution is to cultivate a greater degree of acceptance from his family in order to lessen his anxiety. The family is to “set aside their frameworks of expectations of what he shouldbe, and instead, consider how to support who he is.” The authors explore concepts such as the eight “domains” that contribute to one’s quality of life, including emotional and physical well-being, leisure interactions, self-determination and basic rights, learning and personal growth, and so on. In identifying “tensions” in these domains, readers can take action to bring their well-being into balance and rise above the “ethos of blame.” The guide’s sentiments unfold in the bland, often cliched language of most self-help or motivation books: “Your core values will determine how you make choices,” etc. This tendency sometimes makes the book’s 500 pages feel slow and bloated, but patient readers will find the core concept here—the idea of a “heterotopia,” i.e., a radical re-envisioning of human social structures, to be fascinating and well fleshed out. The book is overlong, but the tenets of creating “an optional, effective, secure financial environment,” where people are autonomous agents but also communally responsible, are deftly explored and thought provoking.

A meandering but intriguing blueprint for changing social relationships.

Kirkus Reviews