This is part of a series of posts on happiness. Find the whole series here.
Happiness words
In this series of posts, we’ve already talked a lot about happiness and the different theories about what it really is and how to get it. Let’s now have a look at the words we use to describe happiness. After all, when we talk about happiness, and even when we just think about it for ourselves, we always use the categories that our languages provide in order to make sense of the world. Imagine being born into a language that only has a word for “pleasure” but none for “happiness.” Or a language that uses the same word to describe “happiness” and “beauty.” It is easy to see how such changes in the language would affect one’s perception of what happiness is and what is required to achieve it.
In this chapter we will discuss a fascinating paper by Ruut Veenhoven, a Dutch sociologist who has been very influential in reviving interest in happiness studies and the science of happiness (there’s a link to the paper at the end of this article). He is a founding editor of the Journal of Happiness Studies and the founding director of the World Database of Happiness, which contains research about happiness studies across countries.
In the paper we are discussing, Veenhoven distinguishes between the following terms:
- Happiness
- Life satisfaction
- Quality of life
- Subjective well-being
- Welfare
Looking at these, we can ask: Do all these terms mean the same or different things? And: how would we describe some of the differences?
Recommended for you:
Kunal Kashyap: A Short History of Happiness
The pursuit of happiness has always been one of the main driving forces of human lives. This article recounts the amazing history of the concept of happiness, from ancient times to today, from Eudaimonia to Gross National Happiness.
We can probably agree that these terms are applied to a wide range of phenomena: “Well-being” can mean the quality of one’s life as a whole, but it can also mean how good or bad the practical conditions of one’s life are: for example, how the employment chances in one’s society are or how easily it is to access medical care. It can also mean how intense the feeling of relaxation and enjoyment are that a particular person enjoys at a particular moment in time (“this shower gel is the latest well-being trend”).
In the same way, “quality of life” can refer either to how good a country is in creating the conditions for happy lives (“the quality of life in Switzerland is high”) or it can also refer to the actual happiness of the citizens of a country (“the quality of life in Morocco was higher this year than last year”).
Inclusiveness of the terms
The question is, therefore, whether it makes sense at all to talk of one quality of life, as if there was one single thing that is meant by this term.
Read the full article which is published on Daily Philosophy (external link)
