Suffering, Identity, and the Economics of Religion: Implications for Subjective Well-being and the Good Life

This paper is on subjective wellbeing, more accurately the ‘good life’ in the sense of Aristotle. To account for the fact that suffering is an overwhelming fact of life, I acknowledge that it is intimately tied to our concept of self, our identity. I outline what may be deemed to be the common essence of all the major religions and what that core has to say about our identity, a view that seems to be consistent with emerging evidence in neuroscience. Identity from this perspective is very different from what we normally take our ourselves to be, and it is this fundamental misidentification that is the source of much of our suffering. This is the view of all the great spiritual traditions of the world, but perhaps most forcefully expressed in Buddhism. I then discuss what this implies for the important and burgeoning field of happiness studies. I also discuss how misguided applications of economic ideas to profoundly religious truths can result in distortions in what they intimate and thus perpetuate suffering.