Well-Being is Everywhere—And Yet Most Definitions, Models, and Initiatives are Clueless
An Attempt to Bring Some Semblance of Order to the Chaos
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Well-being is everywhere. Every company has a Chief Well-Being Officer. Every influencer is hawking some 10-step morning routine to maximize it. Your Apple Watch tells you to breathe every five minutes because…well-being. Your boss sent an email about another corporate “mental health initiative” (Spoiler: it’s just a Slack channel with GIFs).
And yet, for something that’s everywhere, we often remain clueless about what the hell this thing actually is.
Ask ten researchers what well-being means, and you’ll get answers ranging from “happiness” to “self-actualization” to “not wanting to punch your laptop on a Monday morning.” Some scientists count five key dimensions of well-being. Others say six. Some say ten. One paper found 99 different measures of well-being covering 196 different constructs (link) —which means almost anything you feel, think, or do that seems “good” could somehow be categorized as "well-being."
Imagine if we did this with creativity. Instead of simply recognizing someone’s creative potential, we’d have “visuospatial creativity,” “Excel spreadsheet creativity,” “creative ability to come up with an excuse when you're late,” and “ability to find parking spots at Costco creativity.” Suddenly, everything is creative, which means nothing is creative. If everyone can be classified as a creative person in their own special way, then the term loses meaning. We’re left without a sensible way of detecting when someone is and is not creative, whether someone crosses the threshold as a creative person worthy of hiring, and what makes creativity work.
Well-being research has fallen into this trap. Instead of providing clarity, it has created a buffet of vague, overlapping terms—happiness, life satisfaction, flourishing, thriving, eudaimonia, and a slew of synonyms that serve the sole purpose of designing one-word book titles.
And yet, we need a way to make sense of all this. Because while well-being is confusing, it matters. It affects how we live, work, love, and function in the world. But right now, trying to measure it is like trying to measure “vibes.”
This is why we’re cutting through the noise and organizing this chaos…
Meet the Hierarchical Framework of Well-Being:
By structuring well-being in a logical, data-driven way, we aim to provide a roadmap for researchers, therapists, and policymakers.
Let me know what you think.
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Todd B. Kashdan is the author of several books including The Upside of Your Dark Side (Penguin) and The Art of Insubordination: How to Dissent and Defy Effectively (Avery/Penguin) and Professor of Psychology and Founder of The Well-Being Laboratory at George Mason University.
This quote hits hard (specially for me, studying creativity for my book):
"Suddenly, everything is creative, which means nothing is creative."
I think from your article, that can also conversely be said of well-being:
"When everything is well-being, nothing is well-being."
Such a great read, Todd. I appreciate the sincerity and also clarity to bring facts into the table. Not everything shining is gold.
Great article (two noticed bugs, I think you meant synthesize instead of synthesis on pg 2 and borrowing instead of burrowing on pg 9 but I'm sure you've already caught them and mistakes like that support your generative AI statement anyway 😂). I like how you organized the characteristics under lenses, though as an amateur student of dynamical systems, I wonder which characteristics might impact others in complementary, deprecatory, reflexive or even compensatory ways both bottom up and top down. Such as how positive affect can inform meaning and gratitude. I know that when my positive affect is up as opposed to my negative and not infrequent affect that it overrides many of the characteristics that would otherwise inform negative wellbeing. On those days I feel like the dog drinking coffee in the burning building. The triggers for this can be tangible or invisible. Though on average the characteristics listed do weigh heavily in rumination. But maybe that's where psychopathology comes in.