Introducing Buen Vivir: The Good Life and Socio-Eco Wellbeing

By adding a more positive framing to degrowth, we can get closer to the objectives of Buen Vivir: a society of Socio-Eco Wellbeing.

In this age of social and ecological turmoil, are we too far from living a good life? We all want the good life, but what does it mean? Indigenous peoples of Latin America have been striving towards it for centuries, with a philosophy and way of life known as (approximately translated from Spanish as the Good Life, or Good Living).

Buen Vivir is a Latin American concept for social and environmental sustainability based on Indigenous cosmology, but one that has evolved over time to include ideas from politics, academia and non-Indigenous communities. It’s about abandoning old beliefs that individual happiness backed by an and boundless economic growth will lead to greater wellbeing, and heading towards a life with more intention, a reciprocity with nature, and embracing community.

It doesn’t imply that individual ambition is unimportant. But rather the idea is that, by switching the way you think about your place within the world as to it, we can achieve greater ecological and social wellbeing collectively…