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monthly reflection on current Lapidus-related issues

August

wellbeing

When we talk about wellbeing, what do we mean? Being well? What is well? is 'well' the same as 'happy'? or 'healthy'? and what, for that matter, is health?

Defining wellbeing is complex, especially for many of us who live in simplified times - or rather, in complex times and a complex world, where there is a strong impulse to simplify and rationalise, perhaps in reaction to multiple and confusing narratives.

Technology can perform tasks millions of times faster than any human - in particular it can process and transmit information. But speed of information transfer does not promote depth of thought. In fact, it squeezes out 'dream-time' and compels many of us to work long and hard at managing a daily inundation of messages.

So far computers do not show great aptitude at reflecting from unique or nuanced perspectives on matters of life, death, wellness, illness, human growth, human change. Humans are still better at this, partly because they have, by dint of being individuals with unrepeatable biographies, context.

In the rush to acquire information and to take action - both imperatives of advanced capitalist societies - we are arguably at risk of inadvertently losing our abilities to think more precisely on moral and philosophical planes.

Standard measures in many areas of life - education, health, personal safety - have become prominent features of life in affluent societies. These checks and balances have accompanied the proliferation of information and its freedoms, the apparent democratisation of information flow, and the global links that have made physical boundaries between people and things more porous. Boundaries are uncertain, and we are uncertain about which ones we want, or how to make them. Legal and societal boundaries have sprung up, not necessarily comfortably, but we struggle to know what - if anything - to put in their place.

The quick definition of wellbeing might be 'a feeling of being well, having basic needs attended to, of contentment'. But as soon as this is uttered, we notice its deficiencies - while levels of contentment may vary, they are not always in direct relation to a sense of 'wellbeing'. And as for happiness - is that not even more evanescent, more unpredictable in its appearances in our lives? Does wellbeing mean an absence of suffering?

The 'happiness' book market is thriving - self-help books and more serious ones where writers explore and try to define the concept. From Aristotle to the Dalai Lama, happiness is a central preoccupation of philosophers. For Aristotle, the Greek 'eudaimonia' roughly translated as 'happiness', which meant not a fleeting emotional state but the reaching of potential in a life through balance and through becoming the best version of oneself over time. For him, contemplation was an activity that contributed to this process.

A simplistic definition of wellbeing quickly expires for anyone involved working in the field of health and wellbeing. It is soon evident that wellbeing can coexist with difficult and challenging experience. A person may be in the final stages of life, their body declining, but with a strong - even strengthening - sense of wellbeing. They may feel joy, appreciative of what life is still able to offer, loved and loving, effective, creative, resolved in areas that were formerly troublesome. They may feel these alongside difficulty and suffering, but something is able to contain and integrate these experiences.

There is plenty of research to show that in so-called developed societies the very means which purport to offer bigger doses of happiness and contentment are actually barriers to them: acquisition, efficiency, diversity of choice, material plenty. Speed, pressure, standardisation, individualism and the accompanying dispersal of groups and communities, are found to influence levels of wellbeing negatively.

Societies where competitiveness is not at such a premium, where communities are more cohesive and have greater equality of resources and opportunities, are found to have more contented populations, with greater resilience.

Wellbeing, it could be said, has to do with an individual's sense of their own personal growth and satisfaction, and also with postive environmental conditions for their realisation on physical, emotional and 'soul' levels of being. As for the wellbeing of environmental conditions - well, that's another story.
© F Hamilton