Ideas on what makes us happy now interwoven with climate crisis

Me and a panel are appearing just before them, on the stage at Glasgow QMU venue, this very evening. Perched on our high chairs we will try, mightily, not to reduce overall levels of wellbeing in the room.

But all of this begs the question of what we mean by “wellbeing”—and whether aiming at a society and economy that increases it is an adequate target, as our environmental indicators flash “code red” (in the IPCC’s words) everywhere.

Some questions. Is it an indulgence to pursue this goal, as harvests start to falter, warming increases inexorably, and extreme weather events increasingly pummel us?

Or is the pursuit of wellbeing a kind of bridge? One that can help populations, governments and businesses cross a yawning gulf – between the deep wish for a stable, flourishing world, and the radical lifestyle consequences that come from heeding the climate science?

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We could perhaps start with what has been the core research nugget of wellbeing economics. Beyond a certain level of income, globally estimated at between £26,000 and just over £50K, our sense of satisfaction and flourishing hits a plateau. The more you make doesn’t mean an equivalent increase in happiness.

For a while, until things got urgently green and viral in our lives, the wellbeing economists used this research as the basis of their critique of our often shabby and shoddy lives. Our depression rates, among adults and children, have been soaring for decades. A majority of Europeans polled said they “seldom had time to do things they really enjoyed in daily life”. Significant minorities (just above and below 40%) report feelings of loneliness.

The wellbeing economists connect much of this to inequality. This isn’t just about spending power, but about the mutually injuring psychological effects of the status differences that we perceive. The poor obviously suffer stress from their low status in a consumption-oriented society, flooding their bodies with inflammatory chemicals. But the rich also suffer internally. “When people can afford to purchase goods, they ask for favours less often”, says sustainability scholar Juliet Schor. “Prosperity itself can corrode community, by undermining our need for one another.”

This rising tide of research - on the irrelevance of consumer-driven growth to what lastingly makes us happy – has increasingly become interwoven with the climate crisis. What we should do (in order to reduce the range of social maladies in our existing societies) becomes what we must do (if that same wastefulness and material excess is pushing our natural systems beyond their limits).

So that which brings us more wellbeing, at the same time saves our planet (or saves us from its wrath).

If it wasn’t precisely the wrong tone, you’d call this a win-win. One of the gurus behind the Wellbeing Alliance and Common Ground, Katherine Trebeck, suggests we could also frame this as a sense of “arrival”, or “returning to home”.

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What if we realised that being contented, calmly and pleasantly among others, was materially and practically possible — but only if we decreased our commitments to ever-more production and consumption? Might we emit a huge sigh of relief if we started to build a society that assumed it had “arrived”, at a state of general enough-ness?

Doughnut economics, promoted by Katherine’s great comrade Kate Raworth, is another metaphor that points to a new liveable zone for us. The core of the doughnut represents a basic level of wellbeing, defined by all the basic researches already mentioned.

The outer ring shows the planetary destabilisations that come when the pursuit of wellbeing slips into hedonism, or pain-numbing, or boredom-slaking - this mainly answered by manic, artificial consumption, whose byproducts choke the planet.

The “dough” in between these rings is where we can build a new society. It shouldn’t be lacking in excitements and challenges—but it need not be addicted to the sugar highs of consumer capitalism. Many entities are trying to build in this zone - in particular cities, regions and small nations, Amsterdam being the most advanced but with Scotland also in the forefront. (Look out for more on the Scottish Government’s wellbeing vision in this newspaper over the next few weeks).

What does wellbeing economics mean, in terms of policies and politics? The outer edge of the field that attracts me is captured by the environmentalist George Monbiot’s phrase, “private sufficiency, public luxury”. This is a riff on the great Scots-Canadian economist John Kenneth Galbraith’s axiom, “private affluence, public squalor”—his 1960s critique of the unequal society.

Monbiot’s version is this: in economies where we’ll bluntly have to produce less and consume less, private sufficiency – a reasonable level of housing, heating, food, communication, meaningful labour – will have to be enough, if we are to radically decarbonise to save our civilisations.

But we should compensate by building a world of public luxury – beautiful, free and accessible public spaces and environs (parks, halls, libraries, venues, museums, transport, maker houses, new forms we should be bold enough to imagine). These would gratify and satisfy the vast majority of any population. A good society should at least be trying to build a beachhead of these resources of public luxury, right now.

In Scotland, one might imagine that public luxury involves the land (and landscape) question in a very direct way. There is a tottering pile of research showing the benefits of access to nature and wildness for urban and suburban citizens. It literally unleashes our biophilia, charges up our old evolutionary wiring, makes us happy mammals.

In these pages, we all know Scotland is an absurdly bountiful country. But it may turn out that one of our most important resources is Scottish nature’s ability to repair and restore us, to salve our consumerist itches. In short, it’s not just the flora and fauna that rewilding might help regenerate.

Another kind of public luxury is being somewhat demonstrated by the Common Ground event itself. Which is that we shift our social enjoyments from the malls and retail parks, towards much more vibrantly festive, convivial and deliberative spaces.

In coming weeks I want to grapple more fully with the mega-history book The Dawn of Everything, by David Graeber and David Wengrow. But one zinger that flies from their pages is that our standard cliches of the simplistic “noble savages” of early pre-agrarian humanity are utterly wrong.

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What they uncover, instead, are societies—indeed, polities—that were constantly embroiled in long civic disputations, with breaks for performing and eating, interspersed with enjoyable spectacles of all kinds. These would happen in the part of the year when these communities knew they had “arrived” at sufficient resources, or at least enough to support such periods of complex socialising.

What if the human default, suggest Graeber the anthropologist and Wengrow the archaeologist, is our need for such “common grounds”, where we jointly exult in each others’ difference and individuality? What if our human past was more innovative and playful, in terms of political economy, than our monotonous, demarcated present? And could be again?

This all might be a bit too much to blurt out, before the Frats launch us into Chelsea Dagger. But if we talking heads are drowned in a tidal wall of feedback, that might be exactly the joyous, overlapping chaos required for the moment. All will be well.

Common Ground starts today at 4pm, Queen Margaret Union, University of Glasgow campus. Register for free at www.commongroundfest.org/