Definition
Subjective wellbeing is the term psychologists use for a person's own evaluation of their life: how satisfied they say they are, how much positive emotion they report, how much negative emotion they report. It is measured by survey, longitudinally and cross-culturally, and forms the empirical basis of modern happiness research.
Harari uses subjective wellbeing as the yardstick against which he tests modernity's grandest claim — that scientific, industrial, and capitalist progress has made human life materially better and therefore presumably happier. The data tells a more complicated story.
Why it matters
How it works
Subjective wellbeing research relies on two main instruments: life-satisfaction questions (asking people to rate their life overall on a numeric scale) and experience-sampling (asking them what they are feeling at random moments through the day). The two measure different things — overall evaluation versus moment-to-moment affect — and tend to diverge in interesting ways.
The basic empirical pattern is that material progress lifts wellbeing strongly while societies are escaping deprivation and weakly thereafter. Once basic needs are met, factors like close relationships, autonomy, purpose, and the ability to compare oneself favourably to a reference group come to dominate. Harari's reading is that modernity has been busy maximising the inputs that no longer matter much while neglecting the ones that do.