Wellbeing

I'm doing a (free) course on social wellbeing and wanted to share something from it, If you fancy joining the course here it is (and the short article on the difficulty of defining 'wellbeing' is below that,

Thanks for reading!

https://www.futurelearn.com/courses/social-wellbeing
"Find out how measuring and promoting wellbeing can make people, organisations and society more focused, considerate and effective."

Background: the difficulty of defining ‘wellbeing’
Here’s a puzzle: why do so many texts on wellbeing or happiness start by looking for definitions, and why do sceptics complain about the lack of definitional precision, when the vagueness of these terms so obviously makes the value of definition doubtful? These terms point towards our ultimate values, our deepest, our vaguest and our most elusive desires and aspirations. What purpose would it serve to wilfully restrict and therefore distort terms that are clearly meant to be vague?

Perhaps the quest for definition is about simplifying these issues so that we can measure them. But if we’re going to try to measure wellbeing, should our measurements emphasise ‘objective’ realities or ‘subjective’ perceptions?

Maybe there is no prospect of finding an adequate and useful definition of any aspect of wellbeing, let alone of defining wellbeing overall. Perhaps what really matters is that we appreciate the value of talking and thinking about wellbeing. On this course, we are calling this the ‘wellbeing lens’ - i.e. the ways in which it can make a difference to introduce the topic of ‘wellbeing’ into people’s thoughts and conversations.

Our view is that neither wellbeing nor happiness are definable, nor can they be understood even as ‘concepts’. There is no single ‘thing’ to be measured or promoted. Rather, wellbeing and happiness are vague reminders of the importance of thinking and talking about what people value - how they hope to live well and enjoy their lives.

Despite its vagueness, the ‘wellbeing’ reminder can still steer us towards useful insights and better plans. It reminds us of our ultimate values and purposes. Reminders about wellbeing or happiness energize our personal and collective motivations, and demand a logical justification for them.

Using the ‘wellbeing lens’
We use the term ‘wellbeing lens’ to refer to these vague conversational guides. Although wellbeing is vague, elusive, and dynamic, it can sometimes be useful to ‘objectify’ it and try to measure aspects of it. But to engage in wellbeing conversions, instead of asking ‘what is it?’ it’s probably more informative to consider: ‘what difference does it make?’ We argue that the wellbeing lens makes three main kinds of difference:

• Positivity: it makes us think and talk about strengths and enjoyments, i.e. about what people ultimately value

• Empathy: it makes us consider all aspects of planning from the perspective of the experiencing subject - what does x feel like or how is it perceived and understood?

• Integration: it makes us consider the whole of someone’s life, thinking about their various life domains, roles, and relationships over time

We also need to ask what kinds of conversation the wellbeing lens might influence. Wellbeing conversations can be conceptual (how we think about various aspects of living well); evaluative (what we ultimately value, why, and hence how valuable particular processes and outcomes are); descriptive (how we communicate about observable manifestations of the many aspects of wellbeing); analytic (how we understand the many kinds of interaction that enable or inhibit wellbeing); and normative (moral discourse about what we ought to do about wellbeing, for ourselves or for others). So the wellbeing lens can make a difference to how we think and talk, how we evaluate, how we describe, how we analyse and understand, and how we believe people should act.

Our course has a simple structure which starts by reviewing the kinds of difference the ‘wellbeing lens’ can make. Week 2 focuses on normative aspects: what difference can and should ‘wellbeing’ make to discussions about personal and organizational goals and plans? What are our co-responsibilities for wellbeing? How should wellbeing feature in our plans? Week 3 looks at the potential of the wellbeing lens in guiding learning strategies - appraising situations, monitoring progress, and evaluating outcomes and achievements.

Subjective versus objective conceptions of wellbeing
Wellbeing requires consideration of psychology, i.e. the ‘subjective’ or ‘internal’ aspects of human experience, as well as the ‘external’ or ‘objective’ aspects of human existence. A ‘wellbeing lens’ should make us consider ultimate values including psychological happiness. It should enrich our critical and empathic appreciation of how people’s minds interact with their external circumstances.

There are two very different kinds of objective:subjective distinction. First, you can distinguish objective from subjective goods or values. When you think about what ultimately matters in life, do you value wealth or the experience of wealth? Health or the feeling of being healthy? Beauty or the sense of looking ok? Achievements or the sense of achievement? These are evaluative considerations.

Secondly, you can distinguish objective and subjective indicators and means of assessment. When considering different approaches to learning about wellbeing, do you want to measure ‘objective happiness’ by counting and aggregating moments of enjoyment, or would you rather assess ‘subjective happiness’ by talking with people about how happy they feel overall? Do you want to measure people’s actual income, or how they feel about their income? These questions concern our approaches to learning about the world around us.

Both of these considerations are relevant to the ‘normative’ field, concerning what we ought to do. By thinking about objective and subjective goods, and about differences between objective and subjective indicators and means of assessment, we hope to arrive at clearer appreciation of what we ought to try to achieve.

© Neil Thin, University of Edinburgh

Thank you for sharing this , i did a Futurelearn course before and i find them very good I will look into this one

It looks great , i joined , thank you again Jedi Vusuki

Here's (another) article from the same course that I found interesting, especially how wellbeing (as a first principle) influence "growth, sustainability, justice, health, and even morality"

Basic truisms or radically disruptive thinking?

Background

The rapid growth of explicit interest in planning for wellbeing is puzzling. After a phase of astonishing global successes in meeting basic material needs and increasing life expectancy, it is of course unsurprising that people’s attention should turn towards more ‘ultimate’ values. Yet aren’t wellbeing reminders far too obvious, and far too vague, to stimulate policy debates or creativity? We invite you to consider whether this obvious and vague term may be constructively ‘disruptive’.

Disruption and innovation

It is often said that we live in an ‘age of disruption’ - an era that supports radical creativity, game-changing behaviour, and ‘disruptive innovation’. People who are ‘disrupted’ drop their usual habits and become energised and creative. This era of astonishingly rapid and diverse innovation is driven by the ongoing global social experiment in mass education and information-sharing. By taking this MOOC, you are using a radically new educational opportunity that may yet prove substantially ‘disruptive’ to the centuries-old system of didactic and often elitist university education.

But can an idea as basic as the ‘wellbeing lens’ be regarded as a creative force for social innovation? We tend to think of creativity in terms of radically new ideas or technologies, such as smartphones, driverless cars, and social media. But some of the most interesting social changes in recent years have come from rather obvious ideas with very long cultural histories. For example, local social currencies go back thousands of years and are simply based on the idea of deliberately fostering local trust. The flat-rate letter delivery system was a radical innovation at the time, but was based on a simple economic principle that everyone already understood. Sharing resources such as taxis and lawnmowers seems new today, but analogous practices are found in most cultures since the dawn of humanity.

The importance of wellbeing: does this ‘first principle’ need re-stating?

In moral philosophy, a ‘first principle’ is a foundational proposition that is self-evident and not dependent on anything else. The idea that human actions ought to be directed towards wellbeing is arguably a first principle. Sometimes, the best innovation comes just by revisiting first principles. Could the ‘wellbeing lens’ be used in this way?

The proposition that we should all promote wellbeing seems blindingly obvious: we all know that our learning strategies, our policies, our practices, our institutional arrangements, and our relationships should be organized with wellbeing in mind. We might further specify, for example, a ‘first principle’ for promoters of distributive justice: that the overall outcome is that the wellbeing of the worst-off is enhanced; that aggregate wellbeing is enhanced; or simply that any strategy should be justified using evidence and rationale concerning wellbeing enhancement.

But even if wellbeing is a basic first principle of social planning, it doesn’t follow that social planners need reminders about wellbeing. Perhaps the wellbeing principle is vague and truistic, and hence boring. Viewed in this way, wellbeing can seem to be a worthy but uninspiring theme.

On this course, we invite you to consider the opposite point of view: when suitably reminded, planners who habitually neglected wellbeing in their personal and collective decision-making can be radically shaken up by the wellbeing wake-up call. In practice, learners and planners often pay far more attention to things that go wrong than to things that go right with people’s lives. Or we pay attention to resources, without following through the actions and relationships involved in translating resources into benefits. Or we use indirect ‘proxy’ indicators of progress, like income or academic scores, without checking their assumed links to wellbeing.

It may, therefore, be radically ‘disruptive’ to force people to pay explicit attention to wellbeing or happiness when they are discussing what to study, what to change, or what to evaluate. There is already the recent example of the radical transformation of psychological disciplines, simply are a result of a small group of scholars and practitioners declaring a collective wish to be ‘positive’.

‘Wellbeing’ adds significant value to conversations about all aspects of planning. Other key terms like growth, sustainability, justice, health, and even morality itself all derive their value from their implicit relationship to wellbeing:

Growth: ‘economic growth’ is a modern idea based on a restricted set of measured activities and exchanges. Growth is only good if it leads to lasting improvements in people’s wellbeing.

Sustainability: the idea we should promote the ‘sustainability’ of any activity or organization, or the idea of ‘sustainable development’ in general, presupposes that there is something good worth sustaining. The main test of whether something is worth sustaining is whether it matters for wellbeing.

Equity/fairness: although justice has some intrinsic value (we want to live in a fair society), the main reason that fair allocations of resources or roles matter is because they influence wellbeing. Unequal wellbeing outcomes are far more morally significant than unequal sharing of money or power. For example, when promoting gender justice, the wellbeing lens directs us to look at gender differences in health, longevity and life satisfaction, rather than restricting our attention to differences in income and prestige.

Health: the rapid proliferation of the phrase ‘health and wellbeing’ suggests that many people involved in health promotion and medicine believe that ‘wellbeing’ adds important information to the concept of health. Rarely is this explained. Logically, health is mainly valued for the opportunities that it confers to pursue wellbeing. A healthy body enables us to live an active life, to think well, to be confident among other people, and to engage in prosocial activities. Health becomes meaningful when actively put to use in the process of living well.

Ethics/morality and law: strangely, texts on ‘ethics’ or ‘morality’ or on laws and legal procedures often say nothing about wellbeing. But any ethical deliberations or legal prescriptions that don’t clarify links to wellbeing must be suspect because they lack plausible justification. For example, religious or other traditional ethical dogma may use a combination of authority, fear, and guilt to persuade people of the moral superiority of particular ways of doing things. Or people may justify obedience to the law by saying ‘that’s the law and that’s that’. Such approaches seek to immunize culture from critical scrutiny. In the long run, this is bound to lead to the perpetuation of unfair and harmful practices. Whether we are religious or secular, our moral values must depend not just on the value of deities or fundamentalist rules, but rather on the link between moral conduct and wellbeing.

‘Other-worldly’ (religious) aspirations: a majority of the world’s population believe in an afterlife and so have some concerns about post-life wellbeing. Even nonreligious people may have a nagging interest in a possible afterlife. Afterlife concerns tend to be ignored by secular-rational wellbeing promoters. Yet people’s beliefs or even vague fantasies about other possible worlds and hypothetical postlife existences interact in important ways with their thisworldly experiences and choices.

© Neil Thin, University of Edinburgh