Well-being means being satisfied with life. Enhancing well-being means what we can do to increase life satisfaction. Well-being is impacted both by our thinking and our emotions. Certainly each person has his own notion of what would make him happy? Or what is lacking in their life that is impacting on his well-being?
Well-being is a state of thriving that involves health, happiness and prosperity. Some researchers have identified six areas of well-being:
- Emotional
- Economic
- Physical
- Spiritual
- Environmental
- Political
Looking farther, well-being can been defined as the presence of the highest possible quality of life in all the areas of our lives such as – health, living standard, career, financial status, family, friends, leisure, clean air, reliable water, sustainable community and a government we trust.
Overall well-being includes both subjective and objective issues. While objective components (example income, health levels, savings, high standard of living) are essential to assess people’s living conditions, subjective well-being means how do we evaluate our life both from the thinking perspective as well as the emotional perspective (for example satisfied, financial insecurity). Subjective well-being means individuals evaluate the satisfaction of their lives.
While the centre of our personal life is centred on enhancing our well-being, at the global level, policy makers have come to the conclusion that economic indicators (such as Gross Domestic Product, Consumer Price Index) is not sufficient to measure people’s well-being or their happiness.
The Organisation of Economic Development (OECD) has in their interesting book “How’s Life? Measuring Well-being” have called on governments to identify what enhances people’s well-being and more importantly to measure it so that the government can understand what is the people’s source of unhappiness and what are they satisfied with.
The 11 areas the OECD suggests, to enhance well-being and the quality of life of the people are:
- Income and Wealth
- Household income
- Household net worth
- Job and Earnings
- Employments
- Earnings
- Labour market security
- Housing affordability
- Work-Life Balance
- Health Status
- Education and Skills
- Social Connections
- Social support
- Civic engagement and governance
- Having a say in government
- Voter turnout
- Environmental quality
- Water quality
- Air quality
- Personal security
- Feeling safe at night
- Subjective Well-being
- Life satisfaction
Each individual may place different emphasis on the above list on what enhances their well-being, Some may feel that what is most important for their well-being is personal security, yet others may think of their income has the most important factor for the their well-being.
Further in what they aspire and what they achieve, how do they assess their achievements. The last component, subjective well-being, suggests that how people experience a particular situation is just as important as the situation itself. For example, if there is a sudden job loss, certainly anyone will feel disappointment. But beyond the initial disappointment, do we feel fearful and unable to face the future or positive that we are confident that with our knowledge and skills we can get a job, maybe even a better one.
Subjective well-being is of the notion that people are the best judges of how their lives are going. This is reflected in how they evaluate the situation (through thinking) and whether they have positive or negative emotions about the situation.
In this overall concept of well-being, one key area of our lives is how we interact with the market, purchasing products and services to bring satisfaction our daily lives – our role as a consumer.
Our role as a consumer involves fundamentally with interacting with the market – to use our hard-earned money to purchase products and services for ourselves and for our families that we hope will contribute to increasing our satisfaction and happiness. Consumer well-being captures our varied experiences in the market place.
Consumer well-being can be expressed as a state in which our experiences of goods and services – such as purchasing, consumption, ownership, and disposal – are judged to be beneficial to both ourselves a consumer and to society as a whole.
