ABSTRACT
This chapter considers well-being from the comparative standpoint of individual human body against the world. Well-being is existential rather than metrical, and other adjectives that seem to pertain include personal, momentary, sensorial and variable. A powerful modern version of such relativism–beyond the world of academic anthropology–is the 'identity politics' that accompanies policies of multiculturalism. The relativization of what 'well-being' might mean in a human life bears significant consequences. If well-being connects with something beyond the self, then what that connection entails–and what that 'self' entails–are matters of great empirical diversity, as even a brief survey has evinced. The diversity is the individual substantiation or operationalization of a universal human capacity to 'sense' and to achieve 'well-being'. The very diversity and its individual provenance–the fact that the well-being is a sense of a particular living person and no other–is evidence of a universal humanity.
