The thrill of same-day delivery, binging Netflix or having food delivered straight to your door is satisfying and a perfect dopamine hit in the digital age. It is also a form of happiness rooted in consumerism, where convenience is everything. However, these quick fixes come at a cost: our deeper well-being and the collective health of society and the environment.
A new course offered by the Faculty of Environment looks to reimagine the pursuit of happiness in ways that centre both people and the planet. Drawing insights from diverse knowledge systems, ENVS 474: Happiness, Well-being and Sustainability will explore how many of the pressing issues of our time are intrinsically linked to the pursuit of individual wellness. Through processes of co-creation, co-sensing, and co-healing, this course aims to help students move beyond consumer-based happiness towards collective flourishing.
"What we are being sold as happiness, particularly by Western popular culture, is deeply unsustainable," says course instructor Dr. Kira Cooper. "This narrow conception of individualistic happiness via immediate gratification not only makes us unhappy but is driving crises of global scale."
Cooper asserts that when happiness is interwoven with collective well-being, its potential to support transformations towards long-term viability expands exponentially. Her research investigates the nexus of inner and outer sustainability and looks at how we can nurture generative responses to planetary crises.
"Many of the current global challenges we're facing emerge from a problematic worldview of separation," she says. "Since mainstream solutions to these issues originate from a reductive and mechanistic perspective, they aren't meeting the complexity of the metacrisis. Helping students recognize that their happiness is interwoven with the well-being of the natural world nurtures conditions for both individual and collective healing in these turbulent times."
ENVS 474 will be offered for the first time beginning winter 2025. The course aims to help students cultivate resilience and other skills they will need as future leaders in the environmental field so that they can respond to urgent issues such as climate change without becoming overwhelmed by the enormity of the challenge.
The launch of this new course is the latest in the broader ecosystem of Waterloo's courses on happiness. In the Faculty of Arts, ARTS 140, The Science of Happiness, is among many topics offered to first-year Arts students, designed to develop critical thinking, communication and information analysis skills. PHIL 125, Happiness, is an interdisciplinary meditation on the nature of happiness and its components.
Weighing climate change and sustainability with societal needs and inequities is no simple task. It makes advancing sustainable futures for the world a complex problem. However, as part of the University's Global Futures vision, Waterloo strives to be a leader in sustainability education and research. We build on this strength by offering new courses like this one to create a world where happiness and well-being are possible for everyone.
Moving forward, we must centralize the environment in discussions around happiness, otherwise we risk perpetuating problematic systems that have got us into the current global sustainability crisis.
"So long as happiness is approached solely for the benefit of the individual, progress towards sustainability will be limited. It's time to reimagine what happiness might look like when it is in service to life," Cooper concludes.
