The Language of Well-Being is Profoundly Broken…Let’s Fix It!

Do you know what “wellbeing” means?

Chances are, you think you do.

But it’s also possible (and perhaps even likely) that the concept of wellbeing you’ve held your whole life isn’t helping you at all. It could even be hindering you from experiencing the full spectrum of blissfulness that is truly available to you each and every day of your life.

Most of us aren’t born into a state of bliss.

We have to find it, work for it, seize it. We must train our minds, open our hearts, and adjust our skills and capacity to perceive the world in ways that nurture and support a state of wellbeing.

Many of us must also overcome cultural, philosophical, or religious conditioning that undermines our ability to realize and believe that the bliss of well-being is achievable, is readily accessible to us, and is something that we are worthy of having in our lives.

And throughout that endeavor, words matter.

Words are a magical gateway to realizing the wonderful potential of our lives.

And yet, our words can also be stealthy, insidious obstacles to achieving the well-being we so desperately need and richly deserve.

It took me years of trial and error, pursuing a range of meditative, introspective, and spiritual practices, before I was able to experience the well-being that I was searching for. But even then, I didn’t grasp the extent to which our language and culture deprive us of the words, idioms, and phrases we need to describe the existence, depth, and, most of all, the achievability of the stunningly wide range of beautiful, radiant, resonant states of being that are available to us.

It was only recently, when I started writing about wellbeing, that I fully realized the extent to which the DNA of our vocabulary and language are embedded with limitations and prejudices that impair our ability to understand the nature, potential, and availability of wellbeing.

Since, even now, I struggle to find words to adequately convey the full scope, challenge, and urgency of this problem, I’d like to share two vivid memories that arose in my mind while I was writing this article.

First, my struggles with the Language of Well-Being remind me of my days as a child in the early 1970s playing with Legos. When I was a kid, the types Legos that I had were simple and few: a small square block, a short and long rectangle block, a thin flat base block, and small square and round individual peg blocks. They came in only three colors (red, blue and white), and the set I got only had a few hundred blocks total.

I loved those Legos. I played with them for countless hours, making childishly rudimentary spaceships, tanks, cars, castle walls for my plastic knight soldiers, and whatever else I could manage.

It was glorious! Probably my favorite toy from my childhood (second only to my beloved Major Matt Mason astronaut action figure). But the truth is, the limited range of the Lego building blocks available to me at the time never allowed me to engender the vivid and exciting images, ideas, and dreams that arose in my young imagination. You need only look to the Legos of today to see the amazing ideas that can be brought to life when one has a richer inventory of building blocks to work with.

Indeed, the work of Ekow Nimako is a great example of the beauty, power, and soulfulness that can emerge when a creative spirit has access to a sufficient quantity and quality of raw materials :

Second, in my struggles with the Language of WellBeing, I have been increasingly reminded of the elaborate vocabulary used by sommeliers to describe the tastes, aromas, and other sensations that they experience when consuming fine wines.

When it comes to wine, I can’t tell the difference between a glass of Chateau Latour and Two Buck Chuck. I hate to admit this, but when I was younger, I tended to snort sarcastically when I found myself in the presence of connoisseurs who would unleash a swirling barrage of strange, colorful words to describe what I should be experiencing as I drank the wine in my glass. Every word of the Language of Wine seemed to soar far beyond what I was actually tasting.

The Language of Wine emerged from the need for special words and meanings to describe, share, and celebrate the particular qualities of human sensory experience relating to wine and wine tasting.

But because sensory experience is uniquely personal and internal, the Language of Wine can be perplexing…especially for those who are unfamiliar with the sommelier’s vocabulary and who lack the finely-developed sensory capacity to experience or relate to what is being described.

The Language of Well-Being is even more challenging.

The words that truly describe the essence and beauty of well-being are as scarce and limited as a 1970’s basic Legos set. Those of us who yearn to discover, expand, and share with others the joys of well-being lack the robust linguistic building blocks available to wine connoisseurs. We have no shared lexicon of words, idioms, and phrases that are finely tuned to describe, discern, and differentiate the many delicious flavors and aromas of wellbeing.

Though I was scornful of the Language of Wine during the insolence of my youth, I now resonate with deep admiration for the sommelier wordsmiths whose passion for their craft compelled them to refine human language to express the subtle essences of sensual experience.

So if wine connoisseurs can boldly hack our language to infuse words with new meanings in the service of their passion, can we not do the same to bring new levels of vitality, clarity, and inspiration to the Language of WellBeing?

I believe we can. I feel that we must.

So let’s give it a try, shall we?

Let’s start with the standard dictionary definition of “well-being.” The current Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines “well-being” as “the state of being happy, healthy, or prosperous: Welfare.”

Honestly, until I started writing this article, I’d never actually looked up the definition of “well-being” in the dictionary. But once I did, I was shocked by how woefully inaccurate and incomplete Webster’s definition is.

First, the use of the disjunctive “or” seems to imply that any one of the three conditions (happiness, health, OR prosperity) is sufficient to attain a state of well-being. This, of course, is ridiculous. We all know people who are prosperous but who are deeply unwell. Similarly, we all know plenty of people who are healthy but could rarely be said to be basking in well-being.

So in Webster’s dictionary, the word “happiness” is doing the heavy lifting to bring meaning to the word “well-being”, with a clarifying reference to the word “welfare.”

That’s a big linguistic mess. Let me guide you down Webster’s wordy rabbit hole to explain why.

First of all, even before looking at Webster’s definition of “happiness”, the common sense meaning of “happiness” (in my view) falls way short of containing the fullness of human experience implied in a modern, common sense reading of the word “wellbeing.”

Webster defines “happiness” as “a state of well-being and contentment: Joy”. Webster also lists “joy” and “bliss” as strong synonyms of “happiness”. In so doing, Webster regards “Happiness”, “Joy” and “Bliss” as essentially interchangeable words for the same lived experience.

Yet Webster constrains the definition of “wellbeing” with the clarifying term “welfare,” which is defined as “the state of doing well, especially in respect of good fortune, happiness, well-being or prosperity.” There’s the “or” again. Also, Webster’s sense of “welfare” appears to focus on a sense of material success and prosperity rather than emotional fulfillment, since it lists “Joy” as a medium-level synonym match for “welfare” and “bliss” as a weak match for “welfare.”

To sum up, the current Merriam-Webster dictionary’s treatment of the word “well-being” is contradictory, inconsistent, and vague. Even worse, it doesn’t begin to convey any sense of emotional ascendency or bliss until you descend into a tangled web of cross-references and synonyms.

For some, this all may seem like tedious semantics and nitpicking. But for me, this definitional dysfunction highlights the brokenness of the Language of WellBeing and why it can be so very challenging to think and communicate in ways that empower us to discover and experience the fullness of wellbeing in our daily lives.

Fortunately, a growing number of experts in the fields of neuroscience, psychology, psychiatry, public health, and public policy are exploring new and better ways to define, describe, experience, measure, and promote wellbeing, and I’m looking forward to exploring some of these wonderful efforts in future installments.

The point I want to make here is that we all need much richer, powerful, vibrant words and meanings to inspire us to reach for the well-being that we deserve. And until we have more fresh, new words and meanings, let us boldly innovate and experiment with the words we do have.

For me, “well-being” is much more than that which is conveyed with words like “welfare”, “prosperity”, “health”, and even “happiness.” It includes and directly expresses a deep, physical experience of pleasure and satisfaction. It includes a sense of flourishing, progress, optimism, and meaningfulness in life. And for me, perhaps most importantly, it includes a felt experience often completely omitted from Webster and most of today’s clinical experts: an experience of wonder, awe, reverence, and sacredness.

I’ve taken the liberty of crafting the term “Well-being” to distinguish my meaning from the conventional Webster’s definition of the word. Grammarly hates it. Autocorrect hates it. Webster hates it. Good. That tells me I’m on the right track.

So, to sum up, in my view, Well-being comprises a synthesis of positive mental, bodily, emotional, and spiritual awareness and experience, and as such, it is the antithesis of Suffering (which is the corresponding negative aspect of those qualities). Well-being is a persistent, restorative, deeply felt sense of peace, contentment, wholeness, and connection to others that is imbued with resonant qualities of happiness, optimism, satisfaction, beauty, joy, wonder, awe, bliss, and sacredness. Well-being is much more than just a concept, thought, or idea. It is a bodily experience; a tactile, lived reality. It is a seeing, touching, hearing, and tasting of the world that infuses the experience of life with ineffable qualities of timelessness and meaningfulness.

These are my thoughts, but if you disagree with me or if you favor a different flavor of definition I’d love to hear from you in the comments.

More than anything, I invite you to join me in finding new words and meanings that expand, enrich, and enliven a new Language of Well-being.