Abstract
Life satisfaction, quality of life, and happiness are three states of being that contribute to personal and collective well-being. The pursuit of well-being has been one of the most enduring and difficult to achieve quests for people now living and for those of the past. In the main, the quest has taken four forms: (1) arriving at a more complete understanding of nature and the meaning of well-being; (2) identifying the various pathways that have been used to attain well-being; (3) identifying the major social, political, economic, religious, and ideological obstacles encountered in the search for well-being; and (4) overcoming those obstacles and moving toward progressively higher levels of well-being.
This chapter draws heavily on the writings of major scholars and thought leaders associated with the quest for well-being. The excerpts included in this chapter illustrate the various meanings associated with well-being and the pathways that have been identified as essential to its attainment. The voices represented include persons drawn from all areas of the social and physical sciences, the arts and humanities, as well as selected persons from the performing arts. They also represent all regions of the world, all religions, all races, as well as views expressed by men, women, children, the young, the old, those rich and those poor; we include the voices of people who live at the center of society and those who live more on its periphery. The contributions made by each of these voices to our understanding of the nature of well-being add to our ability to identify steps that can be taken toward its realization.
Thus, this chapter seeks to (1) frame our understanding of the essential nature of well-being from both historical and contemporary perspectives; (2) offer valuable clues to identify the most and least effective pathways that lead to the attainment of well-being; and (3) identify a variety of ways that people have overcome, or at least minimized, the major obstacles to well-being that they encountered.
The past is never dead. It’s not even past.(Faulkner 1950)
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- 1.
Apartheid was a system of state-sponsored and enforced racial segregation introduced into South Africa at the end of World War II. The system seriously curtailed the civil liberties and political freedoms of the country’s majority black inhabitants and others through the use of strictly enforced identity cards, cruel punishments, torture, imprisonment, and state-sponsored executions and murders of dissident leaders (Apartheid 2014).
- 2.
For Maimonides, the first, or purest, form of charity entailed “Giving an interest-free loan to a person in need; forming a partnership with a person in need; giving a grant to a person in need; finding a job for a person in need; so long as that loan, grant, partnership, or job results in the person no longer living by relying upon others” (Tzedakah 2014).
- 3.
The lesson of the widow’s mite is presented in the Synoptic Gospels (Mark 12:41–44, Luke 21:1–4), in which Jesus is teaching at the Temple in Jerusalem.
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Estes, R.J. (2017). The Search for Well-Being: From Ancient to Modern Times. In: Estes, R., Sirgy, M. (eds) The Pursuit of Human Well-Being. International Handbooks of Quality-of-Life. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-39101-4_1
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