Wellbeing and Flourishing - Two kinds of 'good life'

What the science says

Consensus

The oldest debate in the field is about what wellbeing even is, and it splits into two camps that trace back to ancient philosophy. The hedonic tradition, descended from Aristippus and Bentham, says a good life is one that feels good. The eudaimonic tradition, descended from Aristotle, says a good life is one lived well, in line with your nature and virtues, whether or not it feels pleasant moment to moment. Modern psychology did not settle the argument. It operationalised both sides and measured them.

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The hedonic side became subjective wellbeing, defined as a tripartite thing: frequent positive affect, infrequent negative affect, and a cognitive judgement that your life is satisfying (Diener, 1984). That last piece, life satisfaction, is captured by short instruments like the Satisfaction With Life Scale (Diener et al., 1985). A useful refinement runs inside the hedonic camp itself: your experienced wellbeing (how you actually feel as you go about your day) and your evaluative wellbeing (how you rate your life when you stop and assess it) are related but distinct, and, as we will see, they respond differently to things like income.

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The eudaimonic side became psychological wellbeing, and its most influential map is Carol Ryff's six dimensions: autonomy, environmental mastery, personal growth, positive relations with others, purpose in life, and self-acceptance (Ryff, 1989). The point of the model is that you can be cheerful and still be languishing on these, and struggling day to day while still growing and living with purpose. Self-determination theory sits close by, arguing that wellbeing flows from meeting three basic psychological needs, autonomy, competence, and relatedness, rather than from pleasure as such (Ryan and Deci, 2000). Seligman's later PERMA model (Positive emotion, Engagement, Relationships, Meaning, Accomplishment) tried to fold both traditions into one practical framework, and it underpins much applied positive psychology (Seligman, 2011).

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By the 2010s all this had escaped the lab. Governments began measuring national wellbeing directly, through the OECD's indices and the United Kingdom's official statistics, on the premise that a good economy is supposed to serve good lives, not the other way round. Which measure you pick, hedonic feeling, life evaluation, or eudaimonic functioning, quietly decides what "a flourishing country" even means.

Controversies

Two live disputes sit at the centre of the field, and both are instructive.

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The first is whether the two kinds of wellbeing are really distinct. Philosophically the split is clean, but empirically the hedonic and eudaimonic measures correlate very highly, often so highly that statistically they look like one underlying thing wearing two names. Critics also charge the eudaimonic side with a circularity problem: its scales tend to fold in the causes of wellbeing, such as good relationships and a sense of purpose, into the definition of wellbeing, which makes "meaning predicts flourishing" partly true by construction (Kashdan et al., 2008). The honest position is that the two traditions capture real differences in emphasis, but the claim that they are separate, measurable quantities is shakier than the tidy two-column story suggests.

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The second is the oldest popular question of all: does money buy happiness? Its recent history is a small masterclass in how science should work. Richard Easterlin argued in the 1970s that as whole countries grow richer over time, they do not reliably grow happier once basic needs are met, the "Easterlin paradox", which he still defends and others contest (Easterlin et al., 2010). The question then narrowed to individuals, and two studies collided. Kahneman and Deaton reported that higher income kept improving how people evaluated their lives but that their day-to-day emotional wellbeing flattened out above roughly seventy-five thousand dollars a year (Kahneman and Deaton, 2010). A decade later, using moment-to-moment sampling, Killingsworth found no such ceiling: experienced wellbeing kept rising with income (Killingsworth, 2021). Two credible teams, opposite answers. Rather than trade rebuttals, Killingsworth and Kahneman ran a joint adversarial collaboration with a neutral referee, pooled and reanalysed the data together, and worked out who was right.

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The answer was both, for different people. Two things make it click. The first is that income works on a logarithmic scale, so what matters is proportional change, not absolute dollars: a $10k raise is life-altering at an income of $30k and barely felt at $300k, and each doubling of income buys roughly the same modest step up in happiness. The returns shrink steeply as you climb.

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The second is a split the earlier studies had averaged together. For the roughly four-fifths of people who are not already unhappy, wellbeing keeps rising gently with income and never plateaus. But for the least happy fifth, money helps only up to a point, around a hundred thousand dollars, and then stops mattering, because what is dragging them down, grief, loneliness, chronic pain, a failing marriage, is not the kind of problem money solves (Killingsworth, Kahneman and Mellers, 2023). Kahneman and Deaton's famous "plateau" turned out to be largely the shape of that unhappy minority, blended into the average of everyone else.

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So the honest picture is close to the folk wisdom that "money matters up to a point", but sharper. It is not a hard cliff where more income abruptly does nothing. For most people it keeps helping, only by less and less, and its heaviest lifting is done early, carrying people out of hardship into security and a dignified footing in their own society, which is itself partly relative to the people around them. Past that, money reliably buys away certain miseries, but it does not, on its own, secure the things that carry the most weight in a good life, close relationships, health, and a sense of meaning, which is why, as observers of the very wealthy often note, the richest lives are not reliably the happiest ones. The lesson about money is real. The lesson about how a disagreement gets settled, by rivals pooling their data rather than duelling in public, may be the more valuable one.

Limitations

Almost all of this rests on self-report, and much of it on Western, wealthy samples, while the very idea of a "good life" is culturally loaded, so cross-country league tables of happiness should be read with care. Hedonic measures move with your mood at the moment you are asked. The eudaimonic scales overlap heavily with each other and with the hedonic ones. And the income studies are correlational: happier people may earn more, not only earn-more-then-feel-happier.

Open questions

Are hedonic and eudaimonic wellbeing two things or one? What is the real causal structure between money, circumstances, and happiness, beyond the correlations? And how far do any of these constructs, built largely in rich Western countries, describe a good life elsewhere?

So what

The usable core: "wellbeing" is not one number but at least two different targets, feeling good and functioning well, that usually travel together but can come apart, and past a point, more money does less for either than people expect. That matters for anyone who measures wellbeing, promises it, or governs for it.

For companies

If you use wellbeing as a metric, and more brands are, choose the target deliberately, because the measures are not interchangeable. Momentary satisfaction with a product is hedonic and experienced; whether a brand supports someone's growth, autonomy, or sense of meaning is eudaimonic, and a survey aimed at one will miss the other. The ethical edge is the familiar one from L3-13: selling meaning and wellbeing works, and it rings hollow fast when the product does not actually deliver it, so "purpose" and "flourishing" claims are a promise you have to keep. There is also an honesty owed about pleasure itself, since much of consumption sells a hedonic lift that fades and adapts, and past the point where money reliably buys wellbeing, a brand promising happiness-through-purchase is promising something the evidence says it mostly cannot provide.

For political parties and government

The strongest implication is at the level of policy. The premise behind national wellbeing measurement is that growth is a means, not the end, and the income research supports a nuanced version of that: money clearly matters, most for people who have least, with steeply diminishing returns higher up (Killingsworth, Kahneman and Mellers, 2023). That argues for weighting the things wellbeing research consistently links to flourishing, health, secure relationships, autonomy, and purpose, alongside raw output. But the measures are contestable and easy to game, so a government that governs by a single happiness number invites the same trouble as any single target. Use several measures, name which kind of wellbeing each one captures, and treat cross-country comparisons as rough, not gospel.

How to use this

Two habits. First, treat the two good lives as a portfolio rather than a choice: build in some pleasure and some meaning, since a life rich in one and empty of the other is a recognisable way to be quietly unwell, and the research says both count. Second, calibrate your expectations about money honestly. It genuinely helps, especially climbing out of hardship, and it keeps helping most people somewhat, but the returns diminish, and past a comfortable point the reliable gains come from relationships, growth, and purpose rather than from the next increment of income.

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Case studies

• Money and emotional wellbeing, a conflict resolved (Killingsworth, Kahneman and Mellers, 2023). After one study found day-to-day emotional wellbeing plateaus above about seventy-five thousand dollars and another found it keeps rising, the two lead researchers, who had reached opposite conclusions, ran a joint reanalysis with a neutral referee rather than argue in public. They found both were partly right: wellbeing keeps rising with income for most people, but flattens for the least happy minority once they are past a threshold. It is a model of adversarial collaboration, disagreeing scientists settling a question with shared data instead of duelling papers, and a rare, honest answer to a question everyone asks. DOI 10.1073/pnas.2208661120
• Is happiness everything? (Ryff, 1989). Carol Ryff argued that decades of wellbeing research had quietly reduced a rich idea, living well, to a thin one, feeling good, and set out to measure what had been left out. Her six-dimension model of psychological wellbeing (autonomy, mastery, growth, relationships, purpose, self-acceptance) gave the eudaimonic tradition an operational form and showed that people can score high on life satisfaction while doing poorly on growth or purpose, and the reverse. It reopened the question of what wellbeing is, rather than only how much of it people have. DOI 10.1037/0022-3514.57.6.1069

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References

• Diener, E. (1984) 'Subjective well-being', Psychological Bulletin, 95(3), pp. 542–575. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.95.3.542 (Accessed: 18 June 2026).
• Diener, E., Emmons, R.A., Larsen, R.J. and Griffin, S. (1985) 'The Satisfaction With Life Scale', Journal of Personality Assessment, 49(1), pp. 71–75. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1207/s15327752jpa4901_13 (Accessed: 18 June 2026).
• Easterlin, R.A. et al. (2010) 'The happiness–income paradox revisited', Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 107(52), pp. 22463–22468. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1015962107 (Accessed: 18 June 2026).
• Kahneman, D. and Deaton, A. (2010) 'High income improves evaluation of life but not emotional well-being', Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 107(38), pp. 16489–16493. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1011492107 (Accessed: 18 June 2026).
• Kashdan, T.B., Biswas-Diener, R. and King, L.A. (2008) 'Reconsidering happiness: the costs of distinguishing between hedonics and eudaimonia', The Journal of Positive Psychology, 3(4), pp. 219–233. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/17439760802303044 (Accessed: 18 June 2026).
• Killingsworth, M.A. (2021) 'Experienced well-being rises with income, even above $75,000 per year', Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 118(4), e2016976118. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2016976118 (Accessed: 18 June 2026).
• Killingsworth, M.A., Kahneman, D. and Mellers, B. (2023) 'Income and emotional well-being: a conflict resolved', Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 120(10), e2208661120. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2208661120 (Accessed: 18 June 2026).
• Ryan, R.M. and Deci, E.L. (2000) 'Self-determination theory and the facilitation of intrinsic motivation, social development, and well-being', American Psychologist, 55(1), pp. 68–78. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.55.1.68 (Accessed: 18 June 2026).
• Ryff, C.D. (1989) 'Happiness is everything, or is it? Explorations on the meaning of psychological well-being', Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 57(6), pp. 1069–1081. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.57.6.1069 (Accessed: 18 June 2026).
• Seligman, M.E.P. (2011) Flourish: A Visionary New Understanding of Happiness and Well-being. New York: Free Press.

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