The Wellbeing Society
The Wellbeing Society starts from one idea: a society is a system, and that system runs on dials — its labor laws, its safety net, how it runs healthcare and education. Where those dials are set decides how whole life trajectories form: whether work feels secure, whether a setback is survivable, whether your family background limits how far you can reach. The dials are set by choice, not handed down by nature.
The premise is simple. When a life feels stuck or precarious, the cause is usually where the dials are set, not the person living with them. Set employment protection dials low and tie healthcare and retirement benefits to the job, and an ordinary employment setback becomes a negative spiral. Set the dials differently, and the same setback is survivable. The person did not change. The settings did.
These essays do one thing. They take what looks like a moral failing, a culture clash or plain bad luck, and show the structure underneath. They don’t assign blame; they ask how the system is built and how its dials are set. And they compare: where a problem looks like a national flaw, they ask what other countries did differently; where it looks like a personal flaw, they ask who carries risk in the society.
Who this is for. This is written with readers in Europe and North America in mind — that is where most of the comparisons are drawn from — though the way of looking is not limited to them. It is not only for people who work in or around policy and democratic institutions. It is for anyone who wants a clearer view of how their society is built and a stronger hand in changing it: people who want a voice, who want more agency over their own lives, who want a society that does more for those it leaves most exposed, and who want to take part in change — whether the lever is national, state or local. You do not need a background in economics or politics. Only the wish to understand the system well enough to ask more of it.
This is not abstract for me. I grew up working class and am now comfortably middle class — not because I worked harder than my parents did, but because I was born in a country that funds education for everyone and lets people move up. The same person, born where those settings are different, would have had a different life. I have been a foreigner in many countries, I speak each of my languages with an accent, and for years I carried the impostor syndrome that a working-class background leaves behind. None of that is the subject of the writing, but it shapes it: I have watched multiple societies, classes and systems from the inside and from the outside, and they look different from each. Much of what this project notices comes from having seen them from more than one position.
My background is in international finance. I studied finance and economics in Finland and France, spent years designing financial systems and building long-range projections, and led finance teams across several countries. That work is where this way of seeing came from: model how money, incentives and rules move through an organization for long enough, and you start to read whole societies the same way — as systems with inputs, design choices and dials, rather than as collections of good and bad actors.
A few things this blog is not. I have no party and no political affiliation. I will not tell you who to vote for. I take no funding for any of this — no sponsors, nothing to sell. The aim is narrower, and I think more useful than persuasion: to help you see how the system is built, so you can ask sharper questions and know what to demand from the people who set the dials. Democracy works better when more people can do that.
Two essays a week to begin with, then one a week, on Tuesdays. Free to read. The essays are grouped into arcs — foundations, economics, politics, mobility, belonging, pressures — but each essay stands on its own. If you’re new, the Start Here page points to a good first read.
None of this is fixed. Labor law, the safety net, how far someone can move from where they started — these are dials, set by policy, and they can be reset. What was designed can be redesigned, and that is the whole point of this blog.
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