The Good Life, Lived: Eudaimonia as Praxis

Wellbeing science has mistaken the measurement of outcomes for the study of life itself, excising the moral, relational, and practical dimensions of the good life, eudaimonia, actually lived. Wellness culture—the practices, traditions, and communities through which people enact rather than measure the good life—now represents a $6.8 trillion global economy and one of the defining cultural formations of contemporary life. This paper is a theoretical intervention in cultural sociology, informed by long-term immersion in UK wellness cultures and consumption archetypes derived from systematic analysis of global wellness economy data. It develops three interlocking arguments. Building on Heelas and Woodhead's (2005) subjectivisation thesis to show that wellness culture constitutes a reorientation of moral selfhood and situating that reorientation within Taylor's (2007) nova effect—the proliferation of moral and spiritual options in late modern disenchantment, it extends Swidler's (1986) toolkit theory into moral life, arguing that wellness culture functions as a repertoire through which practitioners enact strategies of living well. These arguments converge in the paper's central contribution: the Double Helix of Relational Wellbeing. Across five analytically distinct types of wellness engagement, practitioners share a consistent moral orientation toward the good life—not as a state to be achieved but as an ongoing practice of directing oneself toward higher goods within a shared moral horizon (Taylor, 1989, 1991). This operates through two entangled strands—self and sangha, inner life and community—generative rather than oppositional. In naming eudaimonia as praxis, this paper brings wellbeing science into conversation with practical theology.