This comment helps to highlight the importance of language when discussing this topic. Happiness and wellbeing are not the same thing and it can lead to confusion when the two terms are used interchangeably.
This post explains the three main theories of wellbeing: hedonism, desire-based views, and objective list views. If you’re a hedonist, then failing to optimise for happiness would be a mistake. However, as Owen points out, people often trade off happiness for other things they value which is more consistent with the objective list theory.
Over recent decades, the field of wellbeing science has settled on ‘life satisfaction’ as the primary metric for subjective wellbeing. It’s still important to track other measures too (e.g., positive/negative affect, sense of meaning/purpose), but I share the view that life satisfaction should be the goal of society.
That’s because life satisfaction is the common unit that people use when they make trade-offs between happiness, purpose, duty etc. It’s the ‘all things considered’ assessment of a person’s life, according to what they value. Many attempts to measure wellbeing rely on a dashboard of indicators, but in all those cases, the relative weightings of the indicators are decided by the researchers rather than the subjects of the research and, in my view, that misses the whole point. Having said that, I’ve read some compelling arguments against the life satisfaction approach from Plant (2023) and Thoma (2021) which readers may find insightful.
This comment helps to highlight the importance of language when discussing this topic. Happiness and wellbeing are not the same thing and it can lead to confusion when the two terms are used interchangeably.
This post explains the three main theories of wellbeing: hedonism, desire-based views, and objective list views. If you’re a hedonist, then failing to optimise for happiness would be a mistake. However, as Owen points out, people often trade off happiness for other things they value which is more consistent with the objective list theory.
Over recent decades, the field of wellbeing science has settled on ‘life satisfaction’ as the primary metric for subjective wellbeing. It’s still important to track other measures too (e.g., positive/negative affect, sense of meaning/purpose), but I share the view that life satisfaction should be the goal of society.
That’s because life satisfaction is the common unit that people use when they make trade-offs between happiness, purpose, duty etc. It’s the ‘all things considered’ assessment of a person’s life, according to what they value. Many attempts to measure wellbeing rely on a dashboard of indicators, but in all those cases, the relative weightings of the indicators are decided by the researchers rather than the subjects of the research and, in my view, that misses the whole point. Having said that, I’ve read some compelling arguments against the life satisfaction approach from Plant (2023) and Thoma (2021) which readers may find insightful.