Understanding well-being

Epicurus, ancient Greek philosopher. From Thomas Stanley (1655). commons wikimedia.

‘What is well-being?’ – a hard question. One thing that we need to understand first when we ask this question is that well-being is not a purely scientific or technical term; it’s rather value-laden. When we talk about well-being, we say “this is what makes someone’s life go well” or “this is improving their well-being”, “this is good for them”. Whenever you hear a phrase like that, “good for someone” or “bad for someone”, you have to recognise immediately that there is a value judgement involved. So, this is not something that we can answer with controlled experiments. We have to define well-being in terms of what we care about. Because of this nature of the concept of well-being, there’s been a lot of debate over the centuries and, in particular, in recent decades between people coming from different disciplines and different perspectives about what well-being is. In this context, it’s useful to do a bit of a historical analysis of what kind of ideas have been popular in the past and what sort of debates have characterised the history of thinking about well-being.

Hedonia vs. eudaimonia

If you go back all the way to the Greeks, and I’m just going to do a European perspective because that’s what I’m familiar with, you have the debate between Epicurus, who’s kind of representing the hedonic perspective, or hedonia, with a bit more of an emphasis on pleasure, and that well-being is about feeling well and having a pleasant life. Then, you have Aristotle, of course, saying that this is very low brow, that pleasure and focusing on these sorts of things is something that pigs should care about, not humans. We’re made for something grander than that. He introduces this word quite a lot, eudaimonia, which is more about living a life befitting a human that’s virtuous and that is in accordance with reason.

This kind of tension between whether you feel well or whether you are living in a way that is grand and desirable and valuable, and this tension between hedonia and eudaimonia, is really common throughout all the kinds of discourse on well-being up until today.

The return of hedonia and pleasure

Bentham kind of resuscitates hedonia in a big way after it being in the wilderness for a long time, owing to the primacy of Catholic thinking in particular, or Christian thinking about well-being, which is really about being close to God and living a virtuous religious life. Then Bentham says, this isn’t a great way to do public policy in particular. Rather, we should focus on the balance of pleasure over pain, which is a very hedonic way of thinking about well-being. Very shortly after, John Stuart Mill says that we need to distinguish between higher and lower pleasures: there are low pleasures, and these are the pleasures for pigs; and higher pleasures, which we should put an emphasis on. So, you start to see the kind of cultural value judgements creep back into how we should think about well-being.

Fast forward again 100 years or so to where we are now, and you see a very lively debate in psychology, and to a lesser extent in economics, in which people advocate for a more hedonic perspective, that what matters to people’s well-being is how they’re feeling, and that we should measure their subjective reports about their feelings — about whether they’re happy or stressed or depressed but we shouldn’t really worry about these more nebulous notions, like whether they’re a good person, or whether they feel like their life is meaningful.

Eudaimonia and basic psychological needs

Photo by AlessandroBiascioli

Then you have another group of scholars, particularly coming out of clinical psychology, who are much more concerned with these more eudaimonic elements; but eudaimonia in this new school has transformed slightly from the emphasis in philosophy on whether you’re virtuous, whether you’re moral and whether you’re reasonable – so whether you’re living a logical life or whether you’re full of dissonance and compartmentalisation – to being focused more on what are called basic psychological needs. The emphasis here is on whether you have autonomy in your life, whether you feel competent at the skills that you need to flourish and whether you have nourishing social relationships with people that you care about. There’s also an emphasis on meaning and purpose, which has been a longstanding theme of this more eudaimonic side and, to a lesser extent but I think a growing extent, a revival in the interest in virtue. A lot of that’s driven by the involvement of guilt and shame in people’s well-being: if you feel guilty, if you feel shameful, if you have low self-esteem, which is a kind of social emotion, then you tend to feel bad. This suggests that morality has some role to play in our psychological well-being, if guilt is related to morality, you feel like you’ve transgressed either your own principles or, in the case of shame, that you’ve done something that the group would not approve of.

Subjective vs objective ways of thinking

One of the main tensions in the history of thinking about well-being is between this hedonic dimension, about your feelings, and this eudaimonic dimension, which is more about how you’re living. The other big debate that’s characterised a lot of this field, in particular in economics and development studies, is between subjective ways of thinking about well-being and objective ways of thinking about well-being.

Subjective is perhaps the more straightforward. Someone is well if they say they’re well, if they judge their own life to be going well – then who are we to argue with that assessment? That seems, I think, intuitively reasonable. The objective view is rather that your well-being is defined by the presence of certain criteria in your life and whether those criteria are met. For example, do you have enough income to meet your basic needs? Do you have the education to pursue the life that you would like to lead? Are you healthy? – these kinds of matters.

These two positions, the subjective and the objective, are very difficult to reconcile because there are strong intuitive judgements on both sides. Consider, for example, someone who’s blind but really quite satisfied with their life. In this circumstance, subjectively, they’re doing well: they might be happy; they might be smiling a lot; they might really enjoy their life, get a lot of pleasure from it. It seems reasonable to say that they’re well – but then they’re blind. This seems like they’re not well and that, particularly if we’re thinking about public policy, the government should work hard to try to cure this person’s blindness.

Lester Burnham and unhappiness

You can think of someone like Lester Burnham, the protagonist of the film American Beauty and kind of a representation of the archetype of someone who’s lived a very successful life. He’s been professionally successful and made a lot of money. He has a beautiful house. He has a wife who’s very charming and a daughter who’s doing well, seemingly, but he’s having a bit of a mid-life crisis. Now he’s depressed and he’s not feeling very well. We might look at Lester Burnham on an objective account and say, he’s doing very well, and that’s undeniable. However, on the subjective account, he seems to be doing not well at all.

How do we reconcile these two perspectives? That’s very difficult, particularly as we transition to public policy, where there’s a sense that governments should not be getting involved in people’s feelings, that that’s a little bit creepy, a little bit paternalistic. For the most part, historically we have put an emphasis on these objective indicators: income, health, education and so on. The problem with that is, particularly in the advanced nations, we’re now in a situation where most people have enough of these objective things to do whatever it is that they want to do with their life, and they still don’t seem particularly happy.

Finding happiness once we’re rich

The way I think about well-being in this context of, what do we do once we’re rich, is I think first about whether our basic needs are met. The assumption here is, yes. We have enough income; we have enough education; we have enough health. The options available to us are vast. We can choose to bring about whatever life it is that we might want. The problem is that we don’t know what life that is. We have an information shortfall about what would be best suited for us, what would bring us the most well-being, the most happiness, these kinds of things. Now, of course, even in the advanced nations, there are a lot of people who don’t have their basic needs met, and we really need to pay attention to that; however, if we’re talking about a kind of transformation of public policy from a focus on material needs to something that’s more focused on well-being, then I think it’s important that we look beyond basic needs to consider a kind of richer conception of what it means for a life to go well. So where do we start with that? Well, I think the key thing is that we need to reduce this information shortfall.

Photo by Izf

We need to understand how it is that people can learn what is best for them. The key thing here is that your affective system, which is how you feel, your emotions, your moods, are actually a very powerful signalling device that communicates to us what it is that suits us and what’s going to bring us well-being. We can follow the signals that the system sends us to move towards those activities, those values, those people that are going to bring us the most well-being – and away from things that are not going well for us.

Tennis, triathlons and navigating our emotions

Let me give you a simple example. Maybe I want to be healthy. This is a value that I have where I want to be fit. Let’s get a little bit more specific. I think: “what are some behaviours that I can engage in that are going to help me become fit?” Then I think, “the easiest thing would be, maybe I’m going to play tennis”.

“I like tennis when I watch it on television, why not participate in that?” Then I go to the tennis club, and I just don’t really like the people there: maybe I think they’re a bit pretentious; maybe I’m not very good at the sport; I just don’t have a lot of talent for it. I get a lot of negative feedback. My emotions are telling me that this isn’t really suitable for me; maybe I should go and do something else. Now, what we need to do is introspect. This is coming back to this Aristotelian idea that you need to live in accordance with reason. You need to think about those feelings, and you need to digest them and try to understand what they’re trying to tell you.

Let’s say that in this case, I think tennis isn’t the right sport at all. I go off and join a triathlon club instead, and I’m really enjoying triathlon.

Now, not only have I got positive emotional feedback coming from the activity itself, the training that I’m doing, I'm also getting a sense of autonomy. I’ve chosen the sport of triathlon instead of tennis, and no one’s prevented me from making that choice. I’ve got competence because I’m getting better at running, jogging, swimming and cycling, and all the other skills necessary for doing well in triathlon and meeting the value that I want, which is to be fit. I’m getting fitter. My time’s coming down and my aerobic capacity’s improving. I’m also building your relatedness, hanging out with people that share the same values as I do, and I get a nice kind of feedback response from them: a virtuous cycle. So, we can see here how my emotional responses and my moods direct me towards certain activities that meet my basic needs.

Discover more about

Well-being

Fabian, M. (2019). Racing from subjective well-being to public policy: A review of The Origins of Happiness. Journal of Happiness Studies, 20, 2011–2026.

Fabian, M. (2020). The coalescence of being: A model of the self-actualisation process. Journal of Happiness Studies, 21, 1487–1508.

The history of thinking about wellbeing