Let’s Talk About Wellbeing

For many people working in politics or on sustainability, wellbeing is a pretty vague word. It’s used to refer to any positive outcomes for the population, often in contrast to economic growth. Policies are said to be good for wellbeing, and it is framed as the ultimate goal of a more balanced economy. However, these claims are often made without much specificity about what this means. National wellbeing, community wellbeing and ecological wellbeing are referred to, basically to mean things that are good for the nation, the community or the environment, without saying what those things are.

For others, wellbeing is synonymous with happiness, a momentary positive emotion, or a positive subjective assessment of how life is going. This is definitely more precise, and can be tightly defined and measured through surveys. But should happiness be the ultimate goal?

At Hot or Cool, we understand wellbeing to mean something more than just happiness, but more narrowly defined than just ‘anything that’s good’. Wellbeing for us are the outcomes that we as humans value intrinsically, i.e. not because they lead to other positive outcomes. This includes our health, our social relationships and our mental states, or subjective wellbeing. Other things are very important, for example jobs, democracy and a healthy environment. But from a humanistic perspective, they are important because they contribute to our human wellbeing.

Turning specifically to subjective wellbeing, it is also more than just happiness (although happiness is not to be sniffed at). As Professor Martin Seligman, one of the grandfathers of positive psychology says, we humans value experiences other than happiness in their own right. He highlights for example sense of meaning and sense of accomplishment.

These other intrinsically valuable experiences are often seen to be the features of a eudaimonic life. As a word, eudaimonia is probably not quite as catchy as ‘happiness’, but it has a long pedigree. Aristotle contrasted eudaimonia with a hedonic perspective on wellbeing. For the Greek philosophers, this was a debate about what is the highest value in life – to simply experience positive feelings, or to live “in accordance with virtue” (as Aristotle described it). As John Stuart Mill questioned many centuries later, it is a question of whether it is better to be a happy pig, or a dissatisfied Socrates.

Modern philosophers and psychologists have not been content with existing definitions of eudaimonia, and there has been heated discussion in recent years about what eudaimonia really means. Hot or Cool was delighted to have been commissioned by the OECD to write a working paper to define eudaimonia, and suggest how to measure it in the general population.

Based on a review of the latest research, we defined eudaimonia as “behaving and thinking in ways that are typically conducive to long-term personal well-being and the well-being of others”. This definition has many implications:

1. Eudaimonia is about how we behave and think, it’s about doing well, rather than just feeling good. But there are specific feelings that are associated with doing well, such as meaning, a sense of relatedness with others, and a sense of competence – we call these eudaimonic feelings.
2. It integrates a long-term perspective. We often are faced with choices between behaviours that make us happy in the short-term or those that will bring us satisfaction and meaning in the long-term. A eudaimonic life is one that involves some of the latter.
3. It’s not just about the individual. As psychologist Joar Vitterso highlights in his new book Humanistic Wellbeing, being social and caring for others is part of being human. Whilst some people can go through life with no regard for others, most of us need to feel that we are having a positive impact on other people, whether it be on humankind in general, or just our closest family.
4. It is a conceptual definition, rather than an operational one. That means it tells us what kind of things eudaimonia could be, but it doesn’t tell us exactly how to measure it.
5. But, it does tell us how to know if something is eudaimonic, and gives us a way to empirically test this. For example, is being optimistic a part of eudaimonia? Well, it depends on whether being optimistic leads us to long-term wellbeing and the well-being of others (for what it’s worth, there is growing evidence that the related concept of ‘hope’ is connected to such outcomes).

You can read more about how we defined eudaimonia (both conceptually and operationally) in our working paper for the OECD, including our recommendations for the four most important thing to measure in terms of eudaimonia.

Considering eudaimonia means that when considering provisioning systems, we are not just focused on calorie intake and access to jobs. We also can recognise, for example, that food and transport provide subjective experiences and a sense of identity which are important to acknowledge in understanding, for example, the resistance to animal-free diets or restrictions on car use.

And, on the other hand, considering eudaimonia broadly – as opposed to just happiness or life satisfaction – means we are not reduced to simply looking at regression equations to help us understand what is important to people, because we can also explore the relationships between different aspects of wellbeing.

Those working towards a better sustainable society have spent a long time understanding what our planet needs to thrive. We want to make sure we also understand what we humans need to thrive.