Eudaimonia: The Tricky Endeavour to Find Evidence for Well-being or Its Absence

The move towards ‘well-being promotion’ that seemed beneficial in its attempt to disentangle the promotion of health from disease-prevention models opened a precarious path related to the ‘proper’ definition of what constitutes health or well-being. Given that the latter regards health as an asset for everyday life choices and not an end product, it is not only open to different points of view about how people should behave, associate, and act towards each other to be well, but since it shifts thinking towards an active, participating citizen, it connects health with prevailing political philosophy. Of equal importance is the predicament for those primarily trained in biomedical paradigms that focus on individual behavioural risk factors to create community-wide lifestyle messages of wellness that require an understanding of human communication not just as a transmission of information but also as a ritual that reflects humans as members of a social community.