Eudaimonia Is A Better Word Than Wellness

We talk a great deal about wellness.

I understand why. Wellness sounds gentle. It sounds like candles, sleep, water, softness, and finally remembering to stretch.

I am in favour of all of those things, especially sleep, which I regard as a hostile negotiation with modern life.

But I think we may need an older word.

Aristotle used the idea of eudaimonia: not pleasure, exactly, and not happiness as we often mean it, but flourishing. Living well. Becoming the kind of human being who can live a good life.

That distinction matters.

A pleasurable life and a flourishing life are not always the same life.

In 2014, Eva Telzer and colleagues published research in PNAS looking at adolescents’ neural responses to different kinds of reward. Reward-related brain activity connected to prosocial, eudaimonic choices predicted declines in depressive symptoms over time. Reward activity connected to more self-focused, hedonic choices predicted increases.

That does not mean pleasure is bad. Pleasure is wonderful. A life without pleasure becomes grim very quickly, and grimness is not moral seriousness.

But pleasure cannot carry the whole weight of a life.

Flourishing asks more of us. It asks who we are becoming, not simply how we are feeling. It asks whether our lives are connected to other people, whether our choices have shape, whether our days are organised around something sturdier than comfort.

Wellness asks, “How can I feel better?”

Eudaimonia asks, “How can I live better?”

We need both questions. But if we only ask the first one, we risk building lives that are soothed but not strengthened.

The point is not to reject pleasure.

The point is to refuse a life made only of it.

Emily Hunt-Adiletta OBE is a bestselling author and keynote speaker.

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