I stopped at a motorway service station the other day and there was a gift shop selling the sort of presents you buy when you are desperate enough to buy a present in a motorway service station.

I STOPPED at a motorway service station the other day and there was a gift shop selling the sort of presents you buy when you are desperate enough to buy a present in a motorway service station. In a display case headed “WELLBEING” were, among many other things, microwavable slippers, cooling gel pillows and “bath bombs” smelling of gin and tonic.

“Wellbeing” is one of the watchwords of our time, as is “wellness”. Both play into our pervasive anxiety about health, but neither has a great deal to do with illness. “Wellbeing” is the state of being physically healthy, but also happy and – another contemporary obsession – “safe”. “Wellness” is an aspiration to pursue or be directed towards: a journey rather than a destination.

My local council has a “cabinet member” for “Culture, Wellbeing and Business”. The NHS runs “Wellbeing Services”, offering psychological support of various kinds. HR people and business executives pay lip service to the concept. “Well” itself is the irregular adverbial counterpart to the adjective “good”. To “do well” originally meant “to behave in a morally good or satisfactory fashion”; later, “to live luxuriously”. By the fourteenth century, “well” increasingly meant “free from illness or injury”.

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