What is well-being?

What is well-being? Is it physical prosperity or is it simply the absence of disease? This is a typical definitional trap that we find ourselves in from time to time. Let’s look instead at the well-being reality. Language is a funny thing. It allows us to communicate with each other about things in our environment to the extent that the participants in the conversation have a common understanding of the subjects. Language starts to fall apart when we talk about feelings or experiences. If someone says that they feel blue, it’s not entirely clear what that means. If you grew up in early 20th century New Orleans, Chicago or New York’s Harlem, you would have a sense of what that meant but there would be nuanced differences that would be expressed in the art form of jazz music of the era. Art, after all is what we rely on beyond the event horizon of language.

Well-being is not a term that is ascendant in western cultures. The Enlightenment and the ensuing scientific revolution led to a very materialistic outlook within the culture. The world, and by definition us as part of it, was assumed to exist in a state of “reality” which could be objectively defined without regard to individual perception or perspective. In such a world, optimum existence, or health, was a function of our physical state aligning with the objective expectations of what it “should” be.  What it should be was just a range of values around an average value for people with no complaints. If you were ill it was because something was outside its normative range and that “problem” needed to be corrected to restore health. This is the western view of well-being. It is the absence of disease defined by the alignment with “normal”. So, how do we determine normal? Quite simply, normal is a number. We love numbers in the west. We can categorize things with numbers and we can track things with numbers.

Here’s where this system breaks down.  You can’t feel numbers and well-being is, despite our obsessions with quantification, a feeling. We are not well unless we feel well. Of course doctors would disagree. If you don’t feel well but all your tests are within range then you must be a hypochondriac.  If you run all the tests in the world and observing the absence of known disease, can you go about your way as if you are well? That’s pretty much what we do in the west. If you still don’t feel well then what should you do? On the other hand, if you have a test that falls outside of the “normal” range but you feel fine, are you well? What should you do?  In the west, of course, the answer is: “There’s a pill that will drive that test metric to the appropriate value”.  Now you are healthy again right? What if you still don’t feel well? “Shake it off…”

Western medicine has produced miracles over the last century. We have eradicated many environmental threats which were previously fatal. We’d like to think that we have increased lifespans but those are only averages. Once again, we rely on numbers but they are just averages. We don’t have longer potential for life. It’s just that, absent the premature deaths from environmental threats, more people are living to our theoretical lifespan.  What we have created in the place of external threats are internal vulnerabilities.  Millions of years of evolution had worked to resolve vulnerabilities, but in the span of a century, we have reversed the work of evolution. The number of systemic and chronic illnesses accelerates geometrically if not exponentially and there appears to be no incentive to change that. After all, chronic illness is very profitable.

It is time to re-evaluate the miracles of the scientific revolution and embrace them as enhancements to earlier, more organic, approaches rather than as replacements. The scientific approach gave us tools that we didn’t have before but they don’t give us life We already had that. The most important legacy tool was the relationship between doctor and patient, a doctor with the humility to know that he is not the giver of life and a patient who has the wisdom to appreciate the life he is given. The resulting understanding of the uniqueness of each person and what constitutes “normal” for that person has given way to the “average” patient (a new interface to the experience we call life). No-one is an average patient though, and no-one responds in an average way to treatment. We are like musical instruments in an orchestra. Each one falls into a category of string, brass, woodwind or percussion and within each category, each instrument has unique qualities that deliver a slightly different sound. The totality of sound produced is called music but the instruments are not the music, nor is the orchestera. They simply resonate the energy of music. So it is with life.  Each individual falls into an overall taxonomy, and each individual has unique qualities that deliver a slightly different experience but the individual is not life, nor is any level of the taxonomy in aggregate. Life exists beyond the event horizon of our senses and we have no language with which to process knowledge of it. We are only resonant bodies for the energy of life and the only word we have to describe the source of life is God. We can only experience life within the confines of our bodies. Optimizing the experience of that life is well-being.