Dr Tadhg O'Mahony

7 December 2022|Degrowth, Development, Economic growth, individualism, Nature, post-growth, Psychology, Sustainability, sustainable wellbeing, systems, Vision, Wellbeing

A new article in Buildings and Cities, from researchers at the University of Toronto, discusses wellbeing in buildings as emerging not from an individual’s interactions with a building, but from systemic social and symbolic elements. This prompted me to consider more the problem with the individualism, that underlies much of wellbeing theory, as discussed in the keystone article on Sustainable Wellbeing in Frontiers earlier this year.

The concept of sustainable wellbeing described in Frontiers pays homage to the body of work from individualism, and how this psychology and economics literature contributes to knowledge, due to its’ importance in contemporary (Western) understandings of wellbeing. However, the sustainable wellbeing article is also quite critical of the reductionist individualism dominant in wellbeing theories. The article notes that while wellbeing theories of the individual can contribute to understanding wellbeing, they are also partial and incomplete, and so the article notes that a system lens is necessary, to move from wellbeing holism to a systems lens, from multidimensional accounts to understanding that ‘wellbeing’ is indeed emergent from the systems in which it is situated, and interacts with. 

In that sense, an objective list account of wellbeing, as supported in the Frontiers article, can indeed be consistent with describing the wellbeing of the individual, of society or of combined social-ecological systems, that include nature, and the dynamic interrelationships among these systems. The key is the lens that is required by the specific theoretical, empirical or practical task, including the scale and related problem formation. 

Practitioner’s need to be very careful about using the atomised individual, which has divorced us from society and nature, and where the bluntness and over-simplification of methodological individualism has contributed to considerable problems -individual, social and in the natural world. It will still be appropriate for psychology, therapeutically, in a clinical setting treating a single person, to be reductionist in approach to the individual, but it is important that individual psychology is also aware of the centrality of society and nature (including the physical and external environment) to each individual’s dynamic process and experience of wellbeing. This is an individualist lens, emerging from recognition of relationality and constituent systems (family, community, society, physical and nature), but aside from these limited cases, in virtually all other settings that can be conceived, it will be the primacy of the systems lens that is necessary. The individualistic lens will be problematic and even catastrophic, as it is causative of the breakdowns arising in modernity, primarily the climate and ecological crises, but also showing in social and economic systems. 

It is crucial that wellbeing becomes the primary goal or our societies, alongside equity and sustainability of nature, where economic growth and consumption are only a means to an end. But this also needs to move beyond individualist approaches, and indicator movements, to a realisation that is conceptually robust, and that is substantial in implementation. This means adopting sustainable wellbeing and moving it through formation of objectives of development, through all policies and programmes that shape state, market and society, to transformationally shift the development path, to a flourishing of people and planet.