The Ethics of Wellbeing

At any given time, I am aware that I could be working harder. I am aware (or at least believe) that someone somewhere is putting in more effort than me, for longer than me, and with more passion than me. While this has disciplined me in many helpful ways, it has also punished me.

I have attempted to hold a tension in this of late, balancing investment in my work with investment in wasting time. And I say “wasting” intentionally: people talk about deep play — balancing your work with an ability to explore the world around you in a meaningful and engaging way. I appreciate this concept, but too often it turns self-care into another venue for productivity, a way to monetize your waste.

If this relentless productivity is the greatest human capacity, if it defines human flourishing, our drive for meaning and creative expression are severe handicaps. We are not computers and never will be.

So, what is a more human function? The ability to “waste” time without having to monetize it. Not the pursuit of profit, nor the pursuit of mere ephemeral pleasure. This is the pursuit of virtuous contentment, of flourishing as a function of balance. Balance in sustainably spending your energy, whatever that means for you. Balance in the value you add to your community and to yourself.

This need for balance, however, exacerbates the pressure I feel to work ever harder. I have a tendency to pressure myself into relentless productivity. An obvious manifestation of the Protestant work ethic, I consider hard work a virtue. But when does the balance of work tip from virtue to vice?

My tendency to conflate productivity with virtue creates a dissonance with my recognition that waste can be essential and that productivity is not inherently good. This has required I challenge my own conception of certain “good” activities, and to expand my understanding of a virtuous character. More dynamic than ambition, a virtuous character accounts for the full picture, the full person, the full story.

Ignorance is Bliss

John Stuart Mill claimed that as you experience higher forms of good, you would not want to return to the lower forms. People would not choose to be pigs. In this way, given enough freedom to experiment with different forms of living, people trend toward virtuous living implying an organic upward trajectory. The human moral community will move toward virtue, engendering human flourishing.

An easy example of this upward trajectory may be education. While “ignorance is bliss” is true enough to be a cliché, it is at the same time generally less valued than education. Given the assumption that education is a good activity in Mill’s sense, increased access to education and literacy rates throughout the world seem to support Mill’s optimism that these higher forms of living will spread. At what point, though, are there diminishing returns, an end to the progress, or even devolution?

One interesting and complicating factor in considering education as a path toward a higher form of living is mental health among graduate students. (Cf. this article from The Atlantic) Rates of anxiety, depression, and suicidal ideation are disturbingly high, being considered a “crisis.” While this is not the education per se that is doing it, none of the virtuous activities to which Mill may have been referring happen in a vacuum. So, graduate work, one of the furthest extents the decidedly virtuous activity of education can go, has clearly problematic outcomes.

Ignorance may indeed be bliss; education clearly isn’t. While education may lend itself to flourishing — and perhaps the graduate students lined up outside the counseling center are indeed flourishing — at some point flourishing without bliss is just suffering.

Being Well vs. Being Virtuous

In a macro sense and to a certain degree, education promotes wellbeing. It is a virtuous pursuit and an important component of society. Like anything, though, it seems to require a form of moderation. A balance.

Perhaps balance comes in momentary stints into lower forms of pleasure. Allowing for Mill’s optimism to be long-term flourishing, could short-term satisfaction from hedonistic pursuits be justified? Either way, it is not the momentary stints into lower forms I’m interested in, but the dissonance between virtuous pursuits and sustainable wellbeing. I’m interested in the wavering of this upward trajectory, virtuous activity impinging on wellbeing, the confrontation of the ethical implications of pursuing wellness.

Perhaps all I need is a shift to virtue ethics. Perhaps virtuous people tend to do virtuous things, even if those things are sometimes lower forms of good, or not productive.

Or perhaps all of my criticisms should actually be focused on capitalism and the alienation of product from producer that has left my identity (qua homo faber) based on nothing: As a member of an inherently creative species, it is crushing to have all that I create measured in terms of profitability, or worse actually taken from me in exchange for a salary to sustain my ability to continue to create goods for that salary (and on and on…).

Perhaps. But there are other more mundane problems that can be more easily addressed (and more readily changed in my own life).

In my view, to consider the fullness of the human experience, wellness must somehow account for both the serotonin in my synaptic gap and the opportunities I have to fulfill my potential. While mental health has many socially constructed variables beyond the physiological components, even these “objective” physiological complexities still allow for some interesting and relevant questions.

For example, few would say it is un-virtuous to take medication when ill, but how far does this acceptance extend? Applying this to mental illness has certainly grown increasingly accepted in the last few decades; chemical interventions (i.e., medical assistance) for the mentally ill is tolerated if not touted. What do we do with an over-diagnosed and overmedicated population? Or, on the other side, what if you do not get the diagnosis but still utilize the chemical intervention? When is chemical alteration for feelings of wellbeing problematic? Is it wrong if you are not ill? Is it wrong if you are dependent? addicted?

Dependence can be understood in terms of the affects when you don’t have something, and addiction when it negatively affects other aspects of your life to get it. Take caffeine — showing up late to work because you had to stop to get coffee (addiction) because you get a headache without it (dependence). This is a mundane example of chemical alteration for wellbeing. While perhaps not virtuous, few would actually call it a vice.

This use of external stimuli for internal management is easily accessible in chemical terms, but many things similarly affect us without chemicals. Media of all sorts influences not only our immediate experience of the world as we consume it, but can also influence our ongoing outlook in shaping our values and coloring the lens we use. Few would say interacting with culture is intrinsically wrong, but there seems to be a spectrum of the good within these. Would Mill care if we relax with TV and movies versus theater and museums? Is classical music a higher good than EDM? Is “low culture” indeed lower than “high culture”?

I’m not sure my appreciation for sit-coms is a vice I need to discipline out of myself, or if it is an opportunity to disconnect my overactive mind so when I do pursue the “higher goods” I do it more effectively. Increase productivity by intentionally wasting my time. Outside of deep play, meaningful engagement with the world, and creative expression, I need to not worry.

That might be all it is, in the end. It’s not a question of virtue and vice, wellbeing and flourishing. It is a question of my inability to stop pressuring myself to be effective. My need to be equally effective working as I am relaxing ensures I am unable to relax.

I am a fairly disciplined person. I do strive to be productive, to be virtuous, and to add clear value to the world around me. Too often, though, I use these drives to punish rather than appease myself. It is only in writing this that I have come to understand that “wasting” is only in relation to the pressure I feel to produce. The selfsame activities I use to waste time become play when I escape pressure. Waste is a reaction to pressures I place upon myself; it is retaliation against myself. Play is response to my genuine curiosity about the world; it is expressive and explorative for the sake of experience.

In the end, I seek balance by escaping the very scale needing to be balanced. I reject the binary of waste and productivity, the red pill/blue pill, in favor of not an alternative but an opting out. I will not measure my life, or the virtue of my actions, based on productivity or a reaction to it. Regardless of how productive or wasteful I am, I will end as I began: Nothing returning to Nothing.