Under contemporary psychological scrutiny, five major conceptualizations of well-being—hedonic affect, life satisfaction, desire fulfillment, eudaimonic flourishing, and non-eudaimonic objective attainment—reveal significant empirical overlap yet retain distinctive psychological profiles, challenging the common presumption of a unified construct of well-being. These five modalities, while statistically intercorrelated, do not collapse into a single dimension when adjusted for measurement reliability; rather, each exhibits unique patterns of association with demographic variables, personality traits, and values, affirming their theoretical autonomy. Desire fulfillment and life satisfaction, for instance, are tightly linked, often reflecting overlapping cognitive assessments of one’s goal attainment and life trajectory, whereas eudaimonia maintains more nuanced connections with creative actualization, openness, and moral aspiration. Importantly, the development of a self-report scale for desire fulfillment—grounded in participants’ personally articulated life goals—offers a methodological advance that integrates subjective appraisal with goal-theoretic accounts of well-being. Empirical modeling suggests a bifactor structure: a general well-being core underpinned by specific, semantically coherent dimensions. This configuration warns against oversimplified indices or composite metrics, which risk flattening ethically significant differences across types of flourishing. More critically, the operationalization of well-being measures is shown to embed normative assumptions about what counts as a life going well, thus transforming empirical choice into a philosophical commitment. Rather than advocating for conceptual unification, the findings support a pluralistic but disciplined framework for well-being science, one attuned to the varied textures of human experience and the methodological demands of valid measurement.
Margolis, S., Schwitzgebel, E., Ozer, D. J. and Lyubomirsky, S. (2021) ‘Empirical Relationships Among Five Types of Well-Being’, in Lee, M. T., Kubzansky, L. D. and VanderWeele, T. J. (eds) Measuring Well-Being. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 377–403. doi: 10.1093/oso/9780197512531.003.0014.
