Well-Being is Not an Entitlement

Most people assume that a sense of well-being is the natural underlying state. Once you recover from your stubbed toe, and your Covid symptoms fade, and the latest emotional turmoil resolves, that's where you’ll return to. That's what awaits you, like an entitlement.

Of course, we rarely actually get there, because we have stuff to do. We're busy! We're occupied by our trivial physical afflictions (First-Worlders are like spoiled princesses, increasingly vexed by smaller and smaller mattress peas), and we stoke Rich People Problems so incessantly that the clouds hardly ever break. But well-being, we assume, lies right over the horizon. The entitlement awaits!

I've had a long string of debilitating maladies. Nothing life-threatening, nothing sexy/dramatic, nothing you'd send me a card for. Just grinding issues that leave one sprawled on a couch for a few weeks or months. Foot problems, stomach problems, infection problems, postural problems, etc.. Just bad enough to prevent me from doing normal things normally. Yet it was years and years before “doing normal things normally” struck me as abnormal.

I'd just had a few good weeks, where I took super long walks and my body Just Worked. Feeling normal felt special, even exultant (I expressed it here). I figured, at first, that this was because I'm an Apprecianist, incapable of jadedness and firmly framed on small blessings. This was surely just more of me appreciating the "everyday".

But now I'm back on the couch for a couple more months (re-torn plantar plate), and I finally get it. I see quite clearly that well-being is not the default. Not at all. What we call well-being is not the natural underlying state. It represents something far more conditional and tenuous: good health. A condition that we in the rich world take for granted…which explains why it took so long for me to recognize it as special.

Good health is a blessing. I know this sounds like something you'd read in Readers Digest or on a needlepoint in an old age home. It's something your great aunt Thelma might tell you while you try not to roll your eyes. But it's dauntingly true. 

So if you're lucky enough to be in this state (I don’t mean feeling PERFECT; I don’t mean "in the shape of your life"; just merely able to get from your car into the store and back without worrying whether you can pull it off) consider unburdening yourself of minor physical perturbations for a moment, and pausing your performative drama and self-victimization, and know that what you are feeling is a bona fide peak state to which you’re scarcely entitled. 

If you can walk and do stuff and generally get done all the daily crap that strikes you as banal irritation blocking your final delightful descent into the cozy couch you imagine as your day's ultimate reward, please be advised that, from my view here on the damned couch, your situation is elevated. It's not banal unless you frame it that way. It's not irritating unless you frame it that way. It's not normal or default or everyday unless you frame it that way.

Like all insights, this compacts into boring cliche with disgusting ease. I don’t explain this at length because I’m, like, windy. It’s because I want to help you viscerally feel it. Perhaps it can induce a momentary reframing into clearer perspective.