Wellbeing is a term that is currently being used with frequency, but without a consistent or agreed-upon understanding of what it means. We all have unique ways of understanding our own wellbeing, and unique ways to address and improve it. However, there are underlying principles (as a researcher of wellbeing, I call these underlying principles constructs) that I believe are consistent regardless of whose wellbeing is being discussed. Just as important as what wellbeing means, though, is who gets to define it. When a definition of wellbeing is handed to us by people outside of our lives and communities, it rarely reflects what actually helps us thrive. In this series of essays, I hope to create a common language around wellbeing that allows conversation about it, but which also allows the space for individuals to explore it and define it for themselves.
I like to approach the idea of wellbeing using a metaphor, and the best metaphor I have is to consider wellbeing like a river ecosystem. There are fish in the river, there is the river itself, and then there are the banks of the river, which can include whatever businesses or natural elements are part of that riverbank. In this metaphor, we as individuals are the fish. Our communities are the river. The systems around us, like government, rules, laws and social norms and expectations, are the banks of the river. We will come back to this metaphor soon, but before that, let’s consider how wellbeing has historically been defined.
Let’s start with the most traditional definition of wellbeing, which can be found in the Merriam-Webster dictionary. In this case, wellbeing is defined as “the state of being happy, healthy, or prosperous.” While this may be a traditional and longstanding definition, apparently first used in 1561, it is vacuous and inane. One may be happy if they have been lost at sea and spot land, but if they are ultimately unable to get to it, that happiness is not fulfilling: Happiness can be unfounded. One may be physically healthy but lack hope, which is, according to the late University of Kansas psychologist C.R. Snyder, a highly compromised state of wellbeing. And we have seen regularly in the news that many people can be prosperous but miserable. These attributes of wellbeing lack substance, and this lack of a substantive understanding of wellbeing leaves us without reasonable ways to understand why we may not be well or how to address our own wellbeing.
Taking that initial foray into one definition of wellbeing, and disagreeing, I would also like to take a look at what wellbeing is not. In our Western society, wellbeing often seems steeped in individual effort, personal ability and ability to financially invest in ourselves. If you have enough “self-care” days, buy enough “self-care” products and spend enough money at the spa, you can achieve wellness, through the sweat of your brow, the cash in your wallet and self-determination. If you light enough candles, take enough baths, go to yoga, meditate and sage your home, you can “have” wellbeing. However, this is also not complete wellbeing; this is a capitalistic format for buying wellbeing. It is what we are sold so that we can feel like we are trying to be well in a world set up to benefit from our unwellness.
The first thing I would like to debunk is the idea that wellbeing is an individual initiative. Wellbeing does not happen in a vacuum, and it is not possible for an individual to achieve when they are decontextualized from their community. Community psychologist Isaac Prilleltensky has long argued that wellbeing is a satisfactory state of affairs across personal, relational and collective domains, and that these domains depend on one another: we cannot be well on our own if our relationships and the systems around us are not well too. Building on this work, I posit that wellbeing must be experienced across multiple domains: individually, communally and systemically. Which is to say, wellbeing is multidimensional.
Moving from the idea that wellbeing is not just a state of “being happy, healthy or prosperous,” nor is it an individually attainable state, I want to delve more deeply into the idea of wellbeing as a multidimensional reality. As I previously suggested, if I argue that wellbeing cannot be experienced by an individual in a vacuum, that would require that each individual’s wellbeing is contextualized and, as the adage goes, “context matters.” The context of our lives impacts our individual wellbeing and that context comes in the form of our community and the systems that govern that community.
Proceeding from the former, and harkening back to the river metaphor, we have three general domains of wellbeing: personal, communal and systemic. The fish is the personal domain: how we sleep, eat, move, manage our emotions and tend our relationships. The river is the communal domain: the belonging, trust and shared practices of a team, a classroom, a congregation or a neighborhood. The banks of the river, and the world around them, are the systemic domain: the policies, structures and resources that determine whether the water runs clean. Each influences the other, none is more or less important than the other, and all tend to trend with one another in a consistent way. If we have systems that are well, we have healthy communities that are well, and individual constituents who are also well.
Most wellbeing efforts in modern society focus almost entirely on the fish. If this fish is not well, we tend to blame the fish, which of course makes no sense. If the individual in our society is unwell, we often ask what more they can do to improve their wellbeing. Of course, we as individuals have agency and can and should take responsibility for what we can: trying to eat, sleep and take care of our bodies, minds and spirits. That matters, but a fish will not stay well in a polluted river, and holding the fish responsible for the condition of the water is neither fair nor effective. Public health researcher Arline Geronimus calls the cumulative wear of chronic adversity “weathering,” and psychologist James Garbarino describes the environments that produce it as socially toxic. No amount of sage, hot baths or self-care undoes weathering and social toxicity.
This metaphor and understanding is the heart of Critical Wellbeing, the framework developed at CADRE from decades of practice and research into communities where people who had been pushed to the margins were thriving holistically (mentally, emotionally, physically, spiritually, psychologically, etc.). Critical Wellbeing is a paradigm. It asks not only whether people are well, but whether the conditions around them make wellbeing possible, and, returning to the point I made at the outset, who gets to decide what “well” means.
Three tenets that give shape to the way Critical Wellbeing can be understood and eventually measured are described below.
The first is Beloved Community. Wellbeing grows where there is trust, belonging and care, and where belonging is built in small, everyday moments. We like to think of these small moments as microaffections (the opposite of a microaggression!). No one can mandate that people feel they belong, but we can create the conditions in which belonging takes root. The second is Cultural Sustainability. Every community already holds assets, what education scholar Tara Yosso calls community cultural wealth, and those assets are where wellbeing begins rather than something added at the end. The third is Shared Power. The people most affected by a system should have a hand in defining what thriving looks like and in deciding what changes.
Underneath all three is an idea that a leader at the Native American Community Academy, one of the educators whose work shaped this framework, put plainly: healing can sound like something that happens once and has an end, but wellbeing is something we practice. It is a process, not a destination. In the river, this means the water is never cleaned once and for all. It has to be tended, and the fish, the river and the banks all shape what it becomes over time.
This also changes how we pay attention to wellbeing. If wellbeing is personal, communal and systemic, if it is defined by the people living it, and if it is ongoing, then checking in on it once a year with a survey someone else designed will not tell us very much. We need to ask people what matters to them, look again regularly and act on what we learn. Otherwise we end up blaming the fish for not being well, while the water stays the same.
This is the work I have dedicated myself to at Cadre: to begin uncovering what Critical Wellbeing looks like in practice, and to support the communities and organizations doing that work. To that end, we have built a learning platform that offers certification in Critical Wellbeing, as well as a dynamic evaluation platform that allows a group to first define what wellbeing means to them, then measure it and then work together to identify strategies for improvement.
I opened this essay by noting that everyone seems to carry their own definition of wellbeing. I do not think that is a problem to be solved; I think it is a starting point. The constructs I mentioned at the outset, the underlying principles that hold true regardless of whose wellbeing we are discussing, are what allow us to honor individual definitions and still build a shared understanding.
In my next essay, I will step further into metaphor, looking more closely at each of the three domains and at the constructs that make up wellbeing within them: what they are, how they show up in our daily lives and how they connect to one another. Until then, I invite you to sit with one question: when you think about your own wellbeing, how much of it lives in you, and how much of it lives in the river around you?
