Meaningfullness is the closest approximation of eudamonic wellbeing. It is both a cognitive and emotional assestment of whether ones's life has purpose and value. Baumeister et al.(2013) argue that while happiness is a natural human state, meaningfulness is culturally dependent.
Meaningfulness may involve understanding one's life beyond the here and now, while happiness is a subjective feeling state, which happens in the present moment.
Life satisfaction reporting is quite close to present feelings, which is closer to happiness than to meaning. Meaning is normally related to longer time frames, which enhances stability on the changing flow of life.
Despite the differences in time frames and stability, there is an overlap between meaning and happines, and interpersonal relationships improve both meaning and happiness.
The main difference is that meaning is more focus on the contribution to the others, rather that how conexion benefits our personal happiness. The former express ourselves as a contribution to the welfare of others.
Some key differences between a happy life and ameaningful life
During this study perform on ~400 individuals they found:
- interdependence between happiness and meaninfulness - conexion, company and flow contribute to both
- the pure effect on helping others is negative for happiness and positive for meaning
- more meaningful lives value more relantionships than achievements
- many tasks, such as cooking or cleaning increase meaningfullness but have no impact on happiness
- meaningfullness is stronger on givers, and the opposite is true on happiness
- arguing and defending a cause does not improve happiness but does for meaning
- rewarding yourself is important for a meaningful life
- happiness is about getting what one wants
- meaningfulness is related to doing the things on which we express ourselves
- meaningful lives could be more stressfull, and hence reduce happiness
- There are two polarized profiles, the one which is a highly engage person in society with high meaning and moderate or low happiness, and the second the taker and focus on one joys that is happy but with low meaning.
Using Gallup World Poll data, Oisi and Diener (2014)
examined the role of societal income for meaning in life
across 132 nations.
Life satisfaction was seemingly higher in wealthy nations than
in poor nations, although at a decreasing return to income.
Meaning in life was higher in poor nations than in wealthy
nations. An overwhelming majority of residents in poor nations report having an
important purpose or meaning in life.
The authors believe this finding can be explained by the negative impact
of wealth on life-meaning: as society becomes wealthier, more people
lose a sense of meaning in life.
The authors try to interpret the high (low) life-meaning in poor
(wealthier) nations through a bunch of random factors: focus on
religious activities, education levels, number of children, individualistic
lifestyles (Northern influence).
Another way of interpreting the finding by the meaning that negative
events and difficult life circumstances might bring to people. Life
meaningfulness tends to be stronger in adversity.
The emphasis on
monetary and material accumulation which makes it more
difficult for people in wealthy nations to see what their
lives ultimately add up to.
They further found that meaning in life predicts suicide
rates, whereas life satisfaction did not.
Being Well Together: Individual Subjective and Community Wellbeing
The notion of community is widely understood as about something more than the sum of the parts. Capturing subjective aspects of local life that are not simply individual but refect the ways in which people feel and are well together is a challenging undertaking.
Most existing frameworks for assessing community wellbeing are premised on a theory of the self as an autonomous, rational and independently acting or feeling individual, and the primary interest is on how community aspects of life impact on individual subjective wellbeing.
This dominant approach consistently neglects spatial and social inequalities, multiple settings and scales and temporal choices and legacies, all of which constitute important political dimensions to community wellbeing.
Social theories of the self as relational put relations as prior to subjectivity and as such aford ways to conceptualise community wellbeing in terms of being well together.
A relational approach can also ofer routes to tackling the complex interactions of inequality, scale and time. Such an approach is not, however, easily translated into quantitative measures or simple policy interventions.
- If our interest is in how community scale factors impact on the individual wellbeing of the community’s members, then aggregating individual wellbe- ing scores is an appropriate approach.
- If community is taken to be more than the sum of its parts then, as a social grouping, assessment needs to capture aspects of life, including wellbeing, as they are lived and experienced together (Howarth 2018; Sirgy 2018).
Subjective assessments of variables that afect collective living (how we feel about local transport, the local economy or local safety, and local social factors such as level of trust in the community etc.);
Researches have argued that assesstments of community cohesion, shared values, belonging and ownership pf community processes may reflect a collective mood that is a subjective form of community wellbeing (Sirgy 2011, Bramton et al. 2002, Sung and Phillips 2018).
While the importance of the social and of context are fagged (e.g. Seligman 2011), the core argument is that positive thinking and positive attitudes (e.g. optimism) can be learnt and taught and, in turn, impact on other aspects of individual wellbeing (e.g. www.actionforhappiness.org). The redirection of intellectual and popular attention to the inner self, rather than the external social context, may also be associated with a redirection of both private and public resources. In the more extreme versions of mindfulness, individual wellbeing derives from escaping the infuence of the social altogether leaving any concern with community largely irrelevant (Whippman 2016).
A community characterised by inequalities is a community characterised by social injustice in the distribution of resources and opportunities. It is important, then, that statistics on the inequality in and between the wellbeing of territorial sub-groups is included as a key indicator of community wellbeing.
Individual level assessments of individual and community scale domains can be aggregated to produce summary measures of sub-territorial groupings but indicators identifying sub-category or sub-territory information needs to be intentionally collected for this purpose. A community with good average wellbeing scores but which mask large sub-territorial inequalities does not align with most people’s idea of good community wellbeing.
If the individual’s wellbeing is assessed within diferent non- or only partially-overlapping settings, then there is no set of other individuals with whom to aggregate individual subjective wellbeing scores into a measure of community wellbeing. On the other hand, if an individual’s wellbeing is only aggregated with the other members of one bounded community (such as residence or workplace), much of the individual’s wellbeing may not be attributable to this single community.
A multi-scalar approach demands explicit specifcation and justifcation of the population groups and scales of interest. A focus on community wellbeing tends to examine differences between neighbourhoods with fndings that include subjective wellbeing as generally (although not consistently) lower in more densely populated, urban locations and countered by a tendency for wellbeing to be higher in populations with easier access to shops, schools, transport, health facilities and so forth.
Trends at a global scale build from actions at the local scale but, in turn, the changes and tensions at the local scale refect infuences from the global scale. This demands an alternative multi-scalar analysis in which diferent scales are simultaneously interconnected and interacting in the production of wellbeing and of each other (Schwanen and Wang 2014). This sits intentionally in opposition to a conventional hierarchical approach in which the larger scale may infuence and impact on the local but rarely vice versa (Marston et al. 2005).
The importance of sustainability was thus at the heart of any consideration of wellbeing, and wellbeing in turn, was viewed as inseparably connected with the twin goals of a healthy future economy and a healthy future environment. Despite this early concern, current frameworks for wellbeing give little explicit attention either to sustainability or to the temporal frameworks within which wellbeing might be amenable to consolidation or change.
Some have argued that eudaimonic wellbeing will always override the short-term gains of pleasure (for example, in Muirhead’s study of environmental volunteerism 2012). In contrast, psychologists describe a consistent and robust preference in human subjects for smaller, immediate rewards over larger, but deferred, rewards (Malkoc and Zauberman 2019). Social scientists argue that modern culture, characterised by the consumerism of contemporary capitalism, promotes and values hedonic wellbeing over the longer-term gains of meaning and purpose (Carlisle et al. 2012) with longer-term costs for sustainability of individuals, communities and, ultimately, the planet.
A eudaimonia-based policy approach, following Cresswell’s (2014) defnition of places as spaces endowed with meaning, would explicitly aim to create places with purpose, where heritage, culture, industry and so forth defne the actions of people in place and are associated with more resilient economies and environments.
Work on inter-generational transfers tends to focus on material conditions and entitlements, the transmission of poverty from one generation to the next and the distributional inequalities of resource under austerity. It is, however, equally important to consider the transmission of non-material aspects of life, of meanings, values and relations, all of which contribute to how communities form their identity and self-defne their collective wellbeing (Summer et al. 2009).
The conventional understanding of the individual as bounded, autonomous and existing outside of their social connections ignores a signifcant tranche of contemporary social theorisation on relationality. All schema for wellbeing, whether individual or community, always fag the importance of social relationships and relational entities such as trust or belonging, reciprocity, social integration or neighbourhood cohesion (Helliwell and Wang 2010; Uphofet al. 2013).
These, however, are most often only a resource for individual wellbeing, that is, as primarily instrumental to the independent, autonomously acting individual to realise their capacities or their potentialities. Relational theories reject the primacy, or even the pre-givenness, of the individual, the associated concepts of autonomy, rational choice or self-interest and the capture of these through individual data.
The concept of inter-subjectivity occupies a moderate position in relational theory. It describes the meanings each of us gives to our experiences and the knowledge we hold of the world as built individually through a set of senses and cognitions and inter-subjectively through our relations with others, mediated through our interactions, involving a reciprocity of perspectives and informed by our specifc social and cultural reference points in the world (Anderson 2008).
Individual and group agendas are often in confict. Indeed, like power, confict is immanent in relationships. To achieve wellness, then, I claim that we have to attend to relationality as well. Two
sets of needs are primordial in pursuing healthy relationships among individuals and groups: respect for diversity and collaboration and democratic participation. Respect for diversity ensures that people’s unique identities are afrmed by others, while democratic participation enables community members to have a say in decisions afecting their lives (Prilleltensky 2008, 122–123).
An alternative pathway to comprehending relationality is to engage the processes for defning the tools for monitoring as themselves contributing to local community wellbeing. The opportunity to set local criteria and local measures, at least in part, acknowledges the limited value, and feasibility, of resolving diverse engagements with community wellbeing into one single defnition and framework. A preferable approach may be, instead, to build evidence of best practice about the processes of decision-making and a set of options for how community wellbeing is assessed (Warner and Kern 2013). There are examples of the processes through which local communities have defned their own measures of progress, whether from scratch or by selecting from an existing suite of indicators. Whilst the choice of measures that result may be little diferent from a set based on an existing framework, or defned by local authorities, the deliberation itself is important for community identity and wellbeing. Discussing and defning what is important locally serves to open discursive spaces as much as it results in a practical output (Scott and Bell 2013; Scott 2012).
The transformative work involves promoting a participatory and democratic process, developing a set of conversations across the community about what is important and allowing, welcoming even, the identifcation and expression of conficts of interest within a deliberative forum.
It is our contention that thinking about community wellbeing premised on the autonomous, individual subject rather than attending to relationality not only results in an impoverished understanding of what it is to be human but, more signifcantly, results in obscuring the complex, enduring and iniquitous processes through which lives, individually and collectively, are unfairly diferentiated.
The key issue in mobilising community wellbeing is, however, less which of the two policy options to choose but what balance to strike between them. This is not a technical question but a political question whose resolution will refect diferent ideological positions about what it means to be human, how and at what scales living well is of interest, and where the most efective and politically acceptable entry-points are for intervention.
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