The importance of Wellbeing data
Wellbeing data is becoming more important. What does this mean for us?
Wellbeing is nothing if not a collective experience. It only really works for us if it does for the people around us. The same way I believe that true Wellbeing can only be achieved holistically, I believe that individual Wellbeing can only be achieved collectively.
How can we inspire others to join us on the journey to happiness? Small steps like positive messaging, as well as larger ones like granting access to Wellbeing solutions through technology, each have their part to play. So far, though, these steps have been taken more by individual people than by society as a whole. Singling out the Wellbeing seekers remains too easy a task, and it’s time for society as a collective to catch up.
The cultural extension of Wellbeing to the whole of society has been recently accelerated by the emergence of Wellbeing data, and its compilation in tables, indexes and rankings for cities, regions and states. For one thing, this puts pressure on local governments to augment Wellbeing provisions in their area. But it also encourages us all to rethink how we rank and value the towns and cities in which we live.
The fact that Wellbeing data is becoming more important speaks to a growing counterculture distrustful of the metrics used in past rankings, where the data collected focused chiefly on economic performance. From a cultural standpoint, I see it as highlighting a shift from capitalistic sympathies to a more humane society that values happiness as much as it does wealth.
It’s not that wealth and happiness are inimical to one another, as I have written about before. The point is that the joint inclusion of economic and Wellbeing metrics in rankings and indexes allows the results to paint a clearer, more authentic and accurate picture of an urban, regional or national environment.
I remember moving to Seattle — a city that’s always been ahead of the curve — in the late 90s, and recognising the conscious efforts of the local government to invest not just in the city’s financial and technological legacy, but in its ecological legacy. Green spaces within the city have been growing since the early 20th century, and nowadays, Seattle is ranked number seven in the world of canopy cover by Treepedia. Cities like Seattle have long known that GDP is not the only criteria worth basing an index on, and have sought to improve their success in areas like the environment — and now Wellbeing — for a more sustainable future where the health of a city, like that of its inhabitants, is treated holistically.
I became interested in this subject as a seeker of Wellbeing and strongly believe that legislators and companies have a growing duty to measure the Wellbeing of their people and employees. But how to do this effectively is another challenge entirely.
As I have stressed repeatedly while discussing my beliefs, Wellbeing is a rich, complex and multifold experience, invoking the state of our friendships to the same extent it invokes the state of our finances and the state of our bodies, to name just a few of its aspects. How can we quantify and amalgamate data into an index that covers all these notions?
Wellbeing indexes like the one created by the OECD are often far from complete, but at least they’re a start. The OECD’s metrics include Community, Environment, Health, Income, and Safety among others. There is also a metric for Education, which in my mind is the primary conduit to social mobility, and therefore incredibly important as it ties in with all seven pillars of Wellbeing as I understand them. I was fortunate enough to get a scholarship to study for a masters in the United States, which opened doors for me I could never have dreamt of back home. The scholastic community of students and teachers that welcomed me is one I always think of when asked about my own experience of Community Wellbeing, a tribute to the power of Education not just as a process through which we grow as individuals, but as a space where we grow together.
I read something in the news recently about a boy named Christian Sodatonou, who scored top marks in exams at the end of high school after being homeless in London for some time. This story confirmed my belief in Education as a space, as Christian owed much of his success to the public libraries which were a safe haven for him in the precarity of his circumstances. Access to public educational resources is precisely the kind of policy that Wellbeing data needs to account for.
I appreciate that configuring data on something as experiential and abstract as Wellbeing is challenging. But I also believe that with the right minds and the right resources, it is wholly possible.
