On Wellbeing Economics

Have you ever wondered what our next economy might be like if it aimed for wellbeing rather than wealth as the means, even the guiding end, of economic life?

Wellbeing is about living: beingness, aliveness. It is about being well, thus, living well, as the means to life's fulfillments. And "well," or "wellness," has more to do with inner health and soul-nutrition and thus with inner "wholeness" than with superfluities of material wealth.

Material wealth is about inertness, thinginess, the material naturifacts and artifacts of living. It is not that much about inner life when well beyond sufficiency and often then contributes to a sort of inward death because we live not much in our super-sufficient things, which too often distract us from our larger selves and amities.

We live mostly in our feelings and imaginings and in our thoughts about those feelings and imaginings -- which bring us our most quietly long-lasting joy when softened and watered by our largest streams of sympathies and empathies. And those are the daily earthly wellsprings of our moral sensitivities and of our most truly kind-hearted compassions.

When wealth becomes an end unmoored from feelings and soul-nourishings, it seems, we become emptier in our innernesses and thus need more things to fill our discomforting vacuum in a self-amplifying growth of the economics of possession.

We are not at all inert, and are only so on earth, in some senses, in the stillness of our passing.

Thoughts to wonder on as one ponders the necessity for a novel economics of wellbeing in an upcoming materially plundered world of ecosystem support breakdowns, which, of course, is really the very ancient economics of wisdom: something once well-known to Old, Old, Africans . . .

What do you think?

Joseph Edozien.

Oh, and I almost forgot, getting lost in my dreamy abstract wanderings, please enjoy the latest from SANE Sustainability News; attached.