Well-being has been a focus of philosophers for centuries. While philosophers tend to question how we should live, the very answer to this question begs the question how living that way will make us better, that is, how living in a certain way will make us live well.
A little self-reflection will help you to realize that there are many things that make you live well, make you happy, excited, or content, or conversely make you feel sad. Think of the things that make you feel happy. Often these things include relationships, friends, money, accomplishments. Now think of things that make you feel sad; these may include anxiety, worry, illness, poverty. Lists of both things, things that make us happy and things that make us sad, can be long and likely will vary from person to person (at least to some extent). The question one may ask is what is it that one thing (or a small group of things) that is fundamentally deterministic of feeling well.
Hedonism is a theory of well-being which focuses on individual’s pleasure or pain. Thus, pleasure is associated with high well-being and pain is associated with poor well-being. On the other hand, perfectionism focuses on our ability to develop certain virtues or characteristics. Perfectionism is similar to eudaimonia; well-being is associated with developing virtues that are human nature. Desire theory proposes that well-being is present when one gets what one desires; in other words, fulfillment of desires is associated with well-being. Objective list theories are a set of theories that have in common a list of things that make one happy; list from one theory may not overlap with another theory. This group of theory highlight the fact that it is not easy to define what constitute well-being.
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