From Sickness unto Life: How Community and Belonging Can Bolster Wellbeing During Serious Illness and End-of-Life Care

Wellbeing is having a heyday. Yet despite recent popularity, both the definition and the experiential content of wellbeing are difficult to pin down (Dodge et al., The challenge of defining wellbeing. International Journal of Wellbeing, 2(3), 222–235. https://doi.org/10.5502/ijw.v2i3.4 , 2012). This difficulty is connected to a deeper conceptual haziness: a haziness surrounding the structure of wellbeing and its relationship to (1) subjective feelings, (2) motivated human action, (3) material conditions, and (4) facts of human embodiment. In order to clarify the relationship and content of these domains, and thereby advance our understanding of what wellbeing is, I will enter the concept through its obverse: suffering. An examination of suffering is fruitful for wellbeing studies due to the fact that, with suffering, it is easier to visualise the centrality of human desire and material concerns to that phenomenon. This focus will help to illuminate the vacuousness of wellbeing when defined purely as the subjective feeling of happiness. Additionally, it will motivate a moral call to alleviate human afflictions—such as oppression, poverty, or, for my purposes here, life-threatening illness and disease—that contribute to suffering and thereby oppose wellbeing.