Philosophers still disagree about what it means for life to go well
Well-being sounds simple: how well someone's life is going for them. Yet thinkers split over whether it comes down to pleasure, to getting what you want, or to a checklist of goods like friendship and achievement. And a poor, frail person who feels happy complicates every attempt to measure it.
At its core, well-being is what is good in itself for a particular person, as opposed to things that are merely useful, like money, or good for the world at large. The two can clash: someone may pursue personal gain that makes things worse overall, and a charitable donation can be morally admirable without making the giver any better off. The word itself came into English in the 16th century from the Italian benessere.
Three families of theory compete to explain it. Hedonists measure it purely as pleasure minus pain. Desire theorists say you fare well when your wants are satisfied. Objective list theories argue that several distinct things matter, often including health, achievement, meaningful relationships and a sense of purpose. A related contrast separates hedonic well-being, a life full of pleasant experience, from eudaimonic well-being, flourishing by developing one's potential.
Measurement adds another split. Subjective well-being is how people feel about and judge their own lives, usually captured in questionnaires, sometimes as simply as rating contentment from 1 to 10. Objective well-being tracks externally measurable factors such as income, education, housing, health and security, which escape the biases of self-report. The two often agree but not always, and some scholars argue that objective factors only indicate well-being rather than constituting it.
Researchers also distinguish the well-being of individuals from that of communities, which may be more than the sum of its members and can conflict with some of them. Although philosophers have debated the subject for millennia, systematic measurement only gathered pace during the latter part of the 20th century, with positive psychology among the drivers.
Source: Well-being
