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Abstract
In the now vast empirical and theoretical literature on wellbeing knowledge of the
subject is provided mainly by psychology and economics, where understanding of the
concept are framed in very different ways. We briefly rehearse these, before turning
to some important critical points which can be made about this burgeoning research
industry, including the tight connections between the meanings of the concept with
the moral value systems of particular 'modern' societies. We then argue that both
the 'science' of wellbeing and its critique are, despite their diversity, re-connected
by and subsumed within the emerging environmental critique of modern consumer society.
This places concerns for individual and social wellbeing within the broader context
of global human problems and planetary wellbeing. A growing number of thinkers now
suggest that Western society and culture are dominated by materialistic and individualistic
values, made manifest at the political and social levels through the unending pursuit
of economic growth, and at the individual level by the seemingly endless quest for
consumer goods, regardless of global implications such as broader environmental harms.
The escalating growth of such values is associated with a growing sense of individual
alienation, social fragmentation and civic disengagement and with the decline of more
spiritual, moral and ethical aspects of life. Taken together, these multiple discourses
suggest that wellbeing can be understood as a collateral casualty of the economic,
social and cultural changes associated with late modernity. However, increasing concerns
for the environment have the potential to counter some of these trends, and in so
doing could also contribute to our wellbeing as individuals and as social beings in
a finite world.