When I first attended university as an undergraduate, like many at that age, I loved to spend time with friends debating profound ideas and issues; trying to understand the world I was encountering as an adult for the first time. For some, that youthful passion for big ideas will dissipate and come to seem like naivety as they move into a career, a marriage, or a mortgage, but that wasn't so for me. For whatever reasons, I continued in my own slow but steady fashion to try to make sense of the world and respond to the profound issues I saw about me. I became politicised in my thirties through the peace and environment movements, and then decided to return to academic study in my forties. It was during my work on a PhD in philosophy that I first encountered and became deeply interested in the role of stress in human social intelligence and mental health. I held onto that interest as I embarked on a career in public health research, examining how governments act or fail to act on the social, economic, and cultural factors that affect the health of whole populations.

In the last several years, I’ve grown increasingly interested in psychological wellbeing; what it is, how it works, how it can be nurtured or undermined. And through that work, it has seemed ever clearer to me that an understanding of human wellbeing has essential insights to offer on the present disturbed and distressed state of our societies and how we can devise and work in practical ways for something much better. This book is my effort to communicate those insights. For me it represents something like the understanding I hoped for as a young man, and for that I feel most fortunate. I hope this book will offer you something in your efforts to understand the world as it is and as it might be.

Matthew Fisher

October 2024