ABSTRACT
Two key psychological aspirations for well-being are to find and maintain benign relationships with others, and the other is to live our best life. The first implies the need to be acceptable and accepted, and to share much the same feelings, sense of belonging and challenges as others around us. We live with intransigent socio-economic inequalities, class distinctions and attendant inequalities in health, which may be the reason why subjectively people tend to prefer to present themselves as being in the middle of society. Objectively, this preference to be seen as living, like others, somewhere in the ‘middle’, is at odds with material inequalities. The second aspiration is about self-actualisation: living in a way that makes one feel happy (‘hedonia’) and permits us to reach our full potential (‘eudemonia’). The features of optimal environments for our health or ‘blue zones’ are offered as healthy locales and the difficulties in translating their lessons elsewhere are discussed.
