Flourishing as ‘sustainable well-being’: balance and harmony within and across people, ecosystems, and time

Academic interest in well-being has blossomed, to the point that numerous forms of well-being have been proposed, covering myriad aspects of the person (e.g. mental, physical, social, spiritual) and of life more broadly (e.g. communal, economic, environmental). This proliferation of forms raises the question of how they might ideally interrelate, and whether there is some kind of overall well-being that draws them together. To that end, this paper argues that a zenith of ultimate or complete well-being would involve managing to sustain well-being across numerous systems (i.e. configurations of different processes and entities), such that they are in balance and harmony. These systems include: (a) the various dimensions of the person; (b) self-and-other (c) people-and-environment; and (d) time. We suggest that attaining all these various forms of sustainable well-being constitutes an ideal of flourishing to which people and societies can and should aspire.