Flourishing as ‘sustainable well-being’: balance and harmony within and across people, ecosystems, and time

ABSTRACT

Academic interest in well-being has blossomed, to the point that numerous forms of well-being have been proposed, covering myriad aspects of the person (e.g. mental, physical, social, spiritual) and of life more broadly (e.g. communal, economic, environmental). This proliferation of forms raises the question of how they might ideally interrelate, and whether there is some kind of overall well-being that draws them together. To that end, this paper argues that a zenith of ultimate or complete well-being would involve managing to sustain well-being across numerous systems (i.e. configurations of different processes and entities), such that they are in balance and harmony. These systems include: (a) the various dimensions of the person; (b) self-and-other (c) people-and-environment; and (d) time. We suggest that attaining all these various forms of sustainable well-being constitutes an ideal of flourishing to which people and societies can and should aspire.

KEYWORDS:

• Flourishing
• well-being
• sustainable
• balance
• harmony

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. One aspect of academic research and theorizing into B/H that needs to be more fully explored is the paradox that optimalism itself seems to be maximalist. As we noted above, optimalism focuses on a balance between too much and too little, whereas maximalism holds that it is not possible to have too much. We used the example of exercise as something that clearly needs to be approached in an optimalist way, with the goal of finding the right balance between too little and too much exercise. But what about the notion of balance itself? It is clearly possible to have too little balance, but is it possible to have too much? We acknowledge, paradoxically, that the way balance is being measured in the Gallup World Poll is categorical (it is a good thing and not a bad thing) and maximalist (the more there is of it, the better). This raises the question whether optimalism itself is maximalist at a meta level; that is, whether it is a maximalism not about things themselves, but about the balance of things. Or is there something deeper about the notion of balance that the Gallup World Poll and this meta-maximalist approach is missing? Could interesting insights on this question be gleaned from a more nuanced approach to measuring balance in the Gallup World Poll? If instead of a binary choice between yes and no, participants were asked to rate how balanced their life is on a continuum, would the results indicate that the more balance one has, the better; or would the data support an optimalist approach to balance, indicating that it is possible to have both too little balance (leading to disorder) and too much balance (leading to boredom) in one’s life?