What makes a life genuinely good, and how can the conditions for wellbeing be secured for everyone without exceeding planetary boundaries?
Rethinking the Good Life: Happiness, Wellbeing, and Planetary Boundaries: a panel discussion organized by Global Visions ry
Date: 21 October 2026
Time: 18:30–20:15
Place: Musiikkitalo, Terassilämpiö, Helsinki
Free entry. The event will be held in English.
Finland continues to be ranked the happiest country in the world. Yet behind the rankings lie rising unemployment, loneliness and insecurity, as well as a way of life that is increasingly incompatible with planetary boundaries.
What do we mean when we describe a society as happy? Can a life be considered good if its material conditions cannot be shared globally or sustained into the future?
Bringing together perspectives from psychology, moral philosophy, sociology and environmental economics, the panel will examine what research tells us about individual wellbeing and the conditions that make a good life possible. The discussion will also consider whether an economy organized around sufficiency rather than continued growth could provide a good life for everyone.
Artificial intelligence further complicates these questions. Can a technology with substantial demands for energy, water and minerals become a tool for living sustainably, or should its development itself be subject to ecological limits?
The panel will also explore how individual practices and local experiments could grow into social norms accessible to everyone, and how utopian thinking and political imagination can widen our sense of what is politically possible.
Guests
Antti Kauppinen is Professor of Practical Philosophy at the University of Helsinki. He specializes in ethics and political philosophy, and has written about well-being, ethical theory, epistemology, and the role of emotions in ethics, among many other things. He is currently working on a monograph about what makes for a good life story from a prudential point of view.
Suvi Salmenniemi is professor of sociology at the University of Turku. Her recent research has addressed the role of utopias and political imagination for social change toward more socially and ecologically sustainable societies. She has also studied sustainability transformation in work and changing understandings and practices of wellbeing. She is interested in using arts-based methods in social research.
Lassi Linnanen is Professor of Environmental Economics and Management in Lappeenranta–Lahti University of Technology, Finland. He has over 30 years of international experience in solving sustainability challenges in academia, in start-up business and in policy design. Currently, he is also the Chair of Finnish Expert Panel for Sustainable Development, an independent science panel operating under the auspices of the Prime Minister’s Office of Finland.
Jennifer De Paola, PhD, is a clinical psychologist and postdoctoral researcher at the University of Helsinki. Her research explores how people in Finland understand happiness and the good life, with particular attention to their cultural dimensions. Her work has been published in journals including Public Understanding of Science and Integrative Psychological and Behavioral Science and has attracted international attention through interviews with BBC TV and Business Insider. Alongside her research, she works in private clinical practice at Compass Psychology in Helsinki, drawing on evidence-based approaches including Compassion Focused Therapy and Acceptance and Commitment Therapy.
Moderators: Max Tallberg and Astrid Aminoff
The discussion will be filmed and later available on our YouTube channel.
