has become a widely accepted integrative metric for evaluating an individual's life state beyond the mere absence of illness, aligned with the WHO's definition of health as a complete state of physical, mental, and social well-being; however, this notion suffers from significant semantic ambiguity due to the vagueness of the component “well,” which tends to be associated with an idealized, normative positive condition rather than with an objective description of a person’s lived reality, thus complicating its empirical analysis and operationalization in clinical or social research; the authors of the article argue that this implicit value-laden framing obstructs impartial scientific inquiry and propose replacing the term with alternatives such as “life experience” or “life condition,” which are emotionally neutral and would enable more precise and expectation-free evaluation, enhancing conceptual clarity and comparability among various well-being frameworks, many of which diverge significantly in their definitions and underlying assumptions; for instance, some models emphasize subjective indicators like personal satisfaction, while others prioritize objective factors like financial stability or access to resources, resulting in non-equivalent outcomes; a relevant analogy is the evolution of medical language that abandoned stigmatizing terms like “hysteria” in favor of neutral nomenclature that allows methodological rigor; in this way, shifting toward a terminology that does not presume positivity would foster a more honest investigation into the complexities of human life conditions, enabling a broader and more nuanced understanding of what it means to be well.
