Chapter Two: The Wellbeing Imperative

Great that you are both starting this discussion.

I’ve enjoyed browsing your site, although I have to admit to being a bit suspicious of some aspects of the ‘well-being’ imperative.

I don’t deny that I could be happier by spending more time with my family, more time with friends, doing more in the community, and getting my hands in the soil from time to time. But I look around at the people who live in this way (and I know quite a few of them), and by-and-large they are either already rich, or they are set to inherit large amounts of money.

George Monbiot wrote of Sheherazade Goldsmith’s book, A Slice of Organic Life that:

[It creates the impression that] “you can save the planet in your own kitchen – if you have endless time and plenty of land. When I was reading it on the train, another passenger asked me if he could take a look. He flicked through it for a moment then summed up the problem in seven words. “This is for people who don’t work.”

This may sound a bit bleak, but many won’t be able to afford houses further up the hill as the waters rise. Of course, they will come, necessarily, to find comfort in simpler things – and this is doubtless positive. But life will also be tougher. They will die younger, and watch their children die younger.

Here’s one example of why this is a problem. Tim Kasser did some interviews with voluntary simplifiers in the US – those who have down-shifted and have an enviably small footprint. There was one overarching concern that they expressed about their life-styles – which was the main reason for many to return to the rat race: What happened when they got ill? They couldn’t afford proper health insurance for themselves or their kids.

Appeals to Maslowian hierarchies is fine whilst we have the lower eschelons covered. But when those basic security needs are not met, it kind of gets in the way of self-actualisation. And as climate change and peak-oil bite, it seems certain that those basic securities are going to prove ever more difficult to establish.

Thanks Tom.

I’m not conviced atall that all the kinds of people who spend time on their community, get their hands dirty with soil and spend more time with friends and family are richer than average. I would love to see the proof.

Its easy to slag off people with lots of money – and after all George Monbiot is the son of a Tory MP and no doubt hardly poverty stricken. Having worked with Zac Goldsmith I saw first hand how much stick he would get if he ever talked about things like wellbeing. But there are plenty of people engaged in transitioning and downshifting who are not so priviledged.

The Happy Planet Index suggests there has to be something in the fact that its not the ‘wealthy’ countries like the US that do well at delivering happy long lives with low footprint.

I very much agree that ‘lower needs’ come first and we are explicitly talking about wealthy developed countries in Citizen Renaissance not developing ones.

[...] suite of industries. Not only that but the evidence that tackling these issues could improve the well being of the majority of people is I believe [...]

I’m also thinking that wellbeing through a simpler life is achievable but that we must also accept that there are several paths that people and their communities/families may travel down over the coming decades. One is to poverty and exclusion in a society that they find it hard to engage in economically or to survive in without economic assets. The second is wealth in great abundance, with whatever unhappiness it might bring, but people in the global economies with growing markets will continue to reap the financial rewards and buy their tickets into space. Thirdly there may be a middle way of a tradeoff between wealth and wellbeing. I may be wrong but maybe we could try to model the outcomes for individuals and communities and try to envisage a world that is more unequal and divided yet has a level of stability [entropy?].