What do we still share in an age of political polarization?

Questions about what constitutes a good quality of life have occupied policymakers and thinkers since Antiquity. Aristotle, for example, argued that defining the good life lies at the heart of political life itself. In recent years, this question has gained renewed urgency as contemporary societies become increasingly fragmented. Disagreements are pervasive across social media and at the ballot box, making public dialogue more difficult. This fragmentation reflects a deeper challenge: our growing difficulty in identifying and expressing what truly matters, and therefore in designing policies that promote our collective well-being.

While an expanding body of research seeks to identify goals that can guide decision-making to advance public well-being, public agencies and institutions across many regions have launched initiatives to assess our ability to measure this effectively. 

While there is no prescription for a single vision of what it means to live well, studies in the area offer suggestions. Research on the regrets shared by people at the end of their lives consistently shows that people’s deepest regrets are rarely about material losses. Instead, they stem from the gap between who they became and who they aspired to be.  

Stories from palliative care workers point in the same direction. At the end of life, people most often regret not living in accordance with their values, devoting too much time to work, neglecting close relationships, or failing to express their emotions. In other words, what people regret most is not a lack of wealth or economic success, but neglecting the intangible dimensions of life: relationships, life paths shaped by constraint rather than choice, and aspirations that remained unfulfilled. Despite the diversity of individual lives, relationships, meaning, and autonomy consistently occupy a central place in how we evaluate our lives. Yet these are precisely the aspects of human wellbeing that remain largely absent from the indicators that currently guide policies. 

Dominant measures such as GDP continue to define progress, aligning prosperity primarily with economic growth. As a result, decision-makers struggle to capture the intangible conditions that genuinely enable people to lead a good life and communities to remain habitable. 

Building on Aristotle’s idea of a concrete universalism- the idea that a quality or value can remain recognizable across different people, places and circumstances- and on contemporary research into the nature and evaluation of the good life, we propose four principles for developing indicators of well-being, which we detail in our recent article, Embodied universalism: An Aristotelian perspective for evaluating the good life. 

First, evaluations should embrace the multiple dimensions of a good life rather than focusing primarily on material well-being. Relationships and emotional expression are also fundamental conditions for flourishing.

 Second, well-being indicators should identify two thresholds: the minimum everyone needs to live well and the limits beyond which one person’s flourishing comes at another’s expense. Aristotle’s ethics of the mean, the idea that virtue lies in finding a balance between extremes, echoes contemporary research on sufficiency, ecological limits, and planetary boundaries.  

Third, they should recognize that multiple factors and causes can shape an outcome, making it easier to understand the various conditions that allow both individuals and communities to flourish. 

Finally, evaluations should be designed together with the people who live in the places being evaluated. Experiences such as the territorial sustainable well-being indicators developed in Grenoble, or the relational capability indicator used to assess the quality of social relationships in communities across the Global North and the Global South, demonstrate that it is possible to build broader, more general indicators from multidimensional and context-specific measures that are co-designed with local residents while remaining relevant to the distinct qualities of each territory. 

At a time marked by coalescing crises and increasingly fragmented visions of the future, there are already many initiatives that seek to create dialogue around what truly matters. Across different territories, ordinary people, researchers, and public institutions are working together to define shared visions of good life and to translate ideas into meaningful practices and policy. 

Without a shared framework for designing fulfilling lives, polarization will persist, driving divisions and weakening our ability to define what personal and communal well-being can look like. Rethinking how we assess a good life offers a path toward rebuilding a common language for collective decision-making and productive debate.