We use a lot of words that sound like happiness: wellbeing, joy, contentment, pleasure, bliss, ecstasy and delight are a few. We know that these words don’t all mean the same thing. Some indicate brief periods of intense happiness, others life-long. Some may be associated with a pleasurable experience, others a state of calm satisfaction.
The goal of this post is to explain the meanings of three main terms: happiness, wellbeing and subjective wellbeing. These words will appear often in my writing, and they have generally accepted meanings for researchers of happiness.
“Happiness” is used to mean one of three things: an experience of pleasure, a positive emotional condition (depression or anxiety are negative emotional conditions), or life satisfaction in whole. There’s more here.
“Wellbeing” has more dimensions than happiness. It goes beyond pleasurable experience or a positive emotional state. It captures how well someone’s life is going from their perspective. A common definition of wellbeing is:
“wellbeing can be understood as how people feel and how they function both on a personal and social level, and how they evaluate their lives as a whole”
What is Wellbeing?
The word “eudaemonia” in the title of this post is an ancient Greek word whose meaning is simply to live well. It comes close to the modern concept of wellbeing.
Moving on to “subjective wellbeing“. As we know, “subjective” means based on opinion or feeling rather than fact. Correspondingly, subjective wellbeing is an opinion of one’s own wellbeing, usually gathered through a questionnaire. The popular word happiness is commonly defined as subjective wellbeing by researchers, so that we may measure and study it.
The thing about subjective things is that there can be too many ways to measure them. Expect disagreements and contradictions. Here are reviews of some measures of subjective wellbeing scales from the Harvard School of Public Health. The first of these is titled: Review of 99 self-report measures for assessing well-being in adults… Ninety nine measures in a single review?! Now, you’re messing with my eudaemonia.