There is a debate in Philosophy as to whether we can evaluate life satisfaction in principle and in practice.
This overlaps with but is not entirely reducible to the issue of whether there are objective measures of life satisfaction because much research looks at a composite picture including both types of measure.
I find the Harvard Flourishing index useful. For me its not entirely reliable but it is broadly instructive.
The "Flourish” measure consists of two questions or items from each of five domains: happiness and life satisfaction, mental and physical health, meaning and purpose, character and virtue, and close social relationships.
What it tells me is that flourishing is many faceted but not arbitrary and it is reasonable to conclude that it can be investigated by empirical methods.
We find ourselves in a mire of problems. Concerning well-being, which is essentially what this should be getting at, we have a myriad of conceptions of what the good life is. Is it hedonistic? Is it objective? Does it address desire fully? And so on.
Is “satisfaction” or “flourishing” something we should seek? It seems to me that geniuses are often unsatisfied. In the literary world, Ernest Hemmingway, Virginia Woolf, Hunter Thompson, Vachel Lindsay and others committed suicide. So did Van Gogh, Cobain and Rothko. Perhaps “satisfaction” is the enemy of genius. The Greeks thought being famous and remembered was more important than being satisfied.
IN addition, perhaps “satisfaction” is the enemy of joy. A long marriage, free of conflict may leave us satisfied, but a tumultuous and uncertain romance may lead to both more joy and more misery. Uncertainty is the essence of romance, which is why romance novels end at marriage or engagement. The married partner may find his relationship “satisfying”. But is it as potentially joyful as that of the uncertain lover who discovers his passion requited?
One of the topics I pay attention to. Something which is often, if not always excluded, in the discussion about life satisfaction is physical health, most specifically, gut health. Yes. Up to 80% of our well being depends on the abdominal health. But it is always excluded when discussions about life satisfaction are presented to us because the connection is not readily seen outwardly and it takes years before failure manifests.
If you actually read their backgrounds, everyone here had suffered physical ailments. Which were followed by mental decline. For those who say, well, so and so had been struggling with mental health since childhood, look deeper into their physical health. This is not to say that mental illness and physical illness cannot appear concurrently.
There were difficulties with quantifying happiness but social scientists still went ahead with imperfect scales and now we have things like happiness maps for the world. A mix of results like wealth tracked happiness and spirituality/religiosity didn’t were discovered.
Harvard’s flourishing metric is a good idea as far as I can tell. It may reveal interesting things about human wellbeing, which has ethical ramifications. This was long-ago suggested by some prominent atheists - it’s about time for science to weigh in on morality.
The notion that assigning numbers to measure subjective opinions makes this process “scientific” seems incorrect. It’s also deceptive – pretending to be scientific.
It’s not based on empirical data. Or if it is, the data is of questionable truth value. It’s based on the subjective opinions of those being questioned.
Even on the questions which seem more objective (on health, for example), isn’t it likely that two people with exactly the same health issues will rate those issues very differently? The hypochondriac might whine about relatively good heslth; the stoic might blithely accept real problems.
Self-reports are empirical data, but that does not settle their quality. The real question is whether the flourishing index has been tested for reliability and validity: do the items hang together, do scores predict anything, and how much do they shift with mood or framing? The hypochondriac/stoic example is a response-bias problem, not a refutation of all subjective measurement. It means self-reports need calibration or corroboration, not that they are automatically unscientific.
Of course the data is empirical and scientific, in a sense. But it is doubtful whether it accurately measures what it claima to measure. If “satisfaction” is defined by those subjective opinions about one’s life that are measured in the study, the study is merely circular. Perhaps the hypochondriac finds gaining sympathy by whinging satisying. Where does that leave us?