The United Nations has recently proposed measuring national progress beyond GDP by incorporating people's well-being. But how can we measure something as elusive as wellbeing, when it seems to belong to the realm of subjective happiness?
Whenever we see friends or colleagues receiving promotions, or scroll through social media and glimpse other people's lives, most of us unconsciously compare ourselves with them. We measure our own lives against a few personal benchmarks and wonder how far we remain from our "ideal life." Interestingly, societies tend to assess their own progress in much the same way.
For more than a year, I have been part of a panel of experts appointed by the United Nations Secretary-General. Our assignment sounded deceptively simple but proved remarkably difficult: to propose a new way of measuring the progress of nations using indicators that go beyond Gross Domestic Product (GDP). The result was the report Counting What Counts, released in May 2026.
The rationale behind this work is hardly new. For decades, economists have recognized that GDP was never designed to measure people's quality of life. It measures the scale of economic activity, and it does that exceptionally well. Over time, however, the world gradually came to treat GDP as a proxy for progress itself. It then became puzzled when GDP continued to rise while people remained anxious, the environment continued to deteriorate, and opportunities for a better life steadily eroded.
Our task was to design a different kind of compass, one called Beyond GDP. It is a dashboard comprising 31 indicators that capture dimensions of progress overlooked by GDP. These include human well-being, encompassing health, income, education, environmental quality, social relationships, safety, freedom, and opportunities for personal development. Beyond GDP also seeks to measure more intangible aspects of life, such as loneliness, interpersonal trust, and how satisfied people are with their own lives.
But how can such intangible experiences be measured and compared when happiness appears to belong to the domain of subjective well-being, or perhaps to mindfulness, whose very essence is to avoid measurement and comparison?
Where does mindfulness touch the compass of progress?
Mindfulness is the quality of paying deliberate, non-judgmental attention to the present moment. Here, I would like to focus on one particular aspect of mindfulness: its invitation to let go of comparison.
Mindfulness does not intersect with every dimension of the Beyond GDP framework. Instead, it touches three.
The most obvious is subjective well-being. Among all the indicators in the dashboard, this dimension is represented by a single number: how satisfied people are with their lives.
The second is social connectedness, measured in part through loneliness, for example, the proportion of people who report feeling lonely for much of the previous day.
The third, and perhaps the most important, is mental health. The report itself acknowledges that this dimension has not yet been adequately measured and identifies it as an area requiring further methodological development.
The comparative mindset behind measurement
Whenever we ask ourselves, "How has life been treating me lately?", we usually step back and make an overall assessment. We compare ourselves with others, or with who we used to be.
National measures of progress operate in much the same way.
If we examine more closely what measurement actually involves, every assessment of progress implicitly consists of three steps.
First, abstraction: transforming the richness, ambiguity, and complexity of lived experience into a number.
Second, comparison: comparing one number with another, this year with last year, or one country with its neighbors.
Third, reference to an ideal. Every scale implicitly points toward a highest attainable state, against which every observed value is interpreted.
These operations deserve careful reflection. Independently of economics, the tradition of mindfulness has long argued that they are precisely the mechanisms through which suffering arises.
From this perspective, suffering does not stem directly from our objective circumstances. Rather, it emerges from a mind that constantly compares the present with an imagined alternative, a mind that continually abstracts, compares, and projects itself toward an ideal.
The Beyond GDP report itself offers an illustration. Across many decades, economies have continued to grow steadily, yet people's sense of well-being, including trust and peace of mind, has declined. The two trajectories have diverged. We presented this divergence as evidence of GDP's limitations. Economic figures alone cannot adequately describe people's lived experience.
Yet I would like to venture a more provocative hypothesis.
Perhaps part of this divergence exists not because we have been measuring the wrong things, but because the habit of comparison, now amplified daily by social media and our culture of rankings, has itself become a source of anxiety that exists independently of material conditions.
If that is true, then an uncomfortable question arises.
Can a new measurement framework, however sophisticated, really address this problem?
Or will it simply create another object of comparison, giving the comparing mind one more thing to compare?
What rung of the ladder are you standing on?
To make the issue more concrete, consider the very instrument that the Beyond GDP dashboard uses to measure national happiness. It is called the Cantril Ladder, and it asks the following question:
"Please imagine a ladder with steps numbered from 0 to 10. The top of the ladder represents the best possible life for you, while the bottom represents the worst possible life. On which step do you feel you stand at this time?"
What does this question ask respondents to do?
It asks them to step back from the present moment, construct an overall assessment of their lives, and then place that assessment on a ladder by comparing it with the best life they can imagine.
In doing so, respondents perform precisely the three mental operations that mindfulness seeks to loosen: abstraction, comparison, and looking upward toward an ideal that has not yet been reached.
Two selves within each of us
The Nobel Prize-winning psychologist and economist Daniel Kahneman argued that each of us is not governed by oneself, but by two, and they often disagree.
The first is the experiencing self. It is the self, living this very moment, reading these words, sensing comfort or discomfort in the present. It exists entirely in the here and now. Sadly, most of these lived moments disappear from memory almost as soon as we move on to the next one, as though they had never occurred.
The second is the remembering self. This is the storytelling self, the one that summarizes and evaluates. When someone asks, "How has your life been lately?", it is not the experiencing self that answers, but the remembering self.
Kahneman made an important discovery. The remembering self does not average all the moments experienced by the experiencing self. Instead, it is shaped mainly by two things: the peak of an experience and the way it ends.
Imagine a family vacation.
For ten peaceful days, the family enjoys life by the seaside, fully immersed in each moment. Yet on the final day, while heading to the airport, they become involved in a heated argument.
The remembering self is likely to judge the entire vacation poorly, even though the experiencing self genuinely lived through ten days of peace and contentment.
The Cantril Ladder asks people to rate their lives against the best life they can possibly imagine. It is therefore a question directed almost exclusively to the remembering self.
It is the self, most inclined to compare.
The self,furthest removed from the present.
The self,most susceptible to dissatisfaction, because it is always looking upward toward the empty rungs still waiting above.
At its core, mindfulness is an effort to shift attention away from the remembering self and back toward the experiencing self, to dwell in the present moment, to stop judging, and to stop climbing the ladder of an imagined ideal.
This leads to an intriguing irony.
Our Beyond GDP expert group, tasked with designing a framework for measuring human progress, has chosen to measure happiness through precisely that aspect of the mind that mindfulness traditions identify as one of the principal sources of human dissatisfaction.
From this emerges a paradox for which there is no complete answer.
Suppose an entire society genuinely became more mindful, more grounded in the present and less inclined to compare life against an imagined ideal.
What would happen to its national happiness score?
Quite possibly, it would remain unchanged, or might even decline, simply because people would no longer feel compelled to keep climbing the ladder.
Should we abandon happiness measures?
For an individual, letting go of comparison can be liberating.
For a society, however, abandoning comparison altogether would more likely amount to neglect.
A meditation practitioner may freely choose not to compare their income with that of their neighbors. That is an expression of personal freedom.
A government, however, cannot afford not to know its infant mortality rate. It cannot ignore where its poorest citizens stand relative to the minimum threshold of human dignity.
If a government were to declare, "We have let go of comparison. We simply embrace the present moment," it would not be enlightened.
It would be abandoning its responsibility to its people.
The way forward lies in recognizing that there are two fundamentally different kinds of comparison.
The first compares in order to identify deprivation.
Who remains below the minimum threshold?
Who has been left behind?
Who lacks access to clean water, education, or safety in their own home?
This form of comparison is grounded in compassion. It begins by recognizing the suffering of others and seeking to reduce it. When institutionalized through public policy, this kind of comparison becomes compassion operating at the scale of a nation.
The second compares in order to rank and compete.
Where does my country stand in the World Happiness rankings?
Is this year's score higher than last year's?
Am I doing better than the person next to me?
This is the form of comparison that feeds anxiety, the comparison against which mindfulness cautions us, and which social media amplifies every day.
The very same number on a dashboard can be interpreted in either way.
A poverty indicator, for example, can prompt the question, "Who still needs help?" Or it can become a reason to boast, "We are doing better than our neighboring country."
The number itself does not determine its meaning.
What matters is how we choose to read it.
Mindfulness without social responsibility
If mindfulness remains purely an individual practice while social responsibility is neglected, mindfulness loses its ethical dimension. It risks becoming merely a tool that helps people endure conditions that ought to be changed, for example, teaching workers to breathe deeply to reduce stress instead of improving a workplace that is exhausting them.
Imagine a government discovering that, rather than addressing structural injustice, it could simply encourage people to be content with what they have, lower their expectations, and cultivate satisfaction. If that alone were enough to raise the nation's happiness score, then subjective well-being would cease to serve as an instrument of public accountability and become little more than a national tranquilizer.
Fortunately, the Beyond GDP framework avoids this pitfall.
It never allows subjective well-being to stand on its own. Instead, it is anchored within a multidimensional dashboard. Alongside happiness and subjective well-being are indicators of poverty, inequality, institutional quality, and environmental conditions.
A government cannot simply reassure its citizens psychologically and then proclaim progress, because the other indicators continue to ask difficult questions.
What about the poor?
What about inequality?
This multidimensional architecture serves as a safeguard. Policymakers must interpret the dashboard as a whole, rather than isolating happiness as the sole measure of success.
What is measurement for?
This leads to a more fundamental question.
Why do we measure the progress of a society in the first place?
There are two possible answers, and they lead to two very different worlds.
The first is that we measure progress to optimize it.
To push every indicator as high as possible.
To climb ever higher on the ladder of happiness.
To ensure that this year outperforms last year.
To surpass neighboring countries.
But if this is our answer, then we have merely recreated the very logic that inspired the Beyond GDP movement in the first place.
We remove GDP from its pedestal, only to replace it with another single number representing happiness. The underlying logic remains unchanged. We continue pursuing productivity under a different name, running along the same endless road of anxiety, only with a new destination.
The second answer is very different.
We measure progress to protect.
Not to maximize happiness, but to establish and strengthen the foundations, the minimum conditions under which well-being, creativity, and the healthy qualities of human nature can flourish on their own.
Health.
Safety.
A clean environment.
Trust among people.
Above all, ensuring that no one falls below the threshold of human dignity.
Under this understanding, measurement and mindfulness are no longer in conflict.
The role of government is to build those foundations and create the conditions under which people can thrive.
But inner well-being, the peace that comes from being fully present, cannot be prescribed, produced, or guaranteed by any government. Nor can it be manufactured by any statistical indicator.
It belongs to each individual, in each moment of life.
If measurement remains humble, it has only one task: to protect the possibility of human flourishing.
It prepares the soil.
But it cannot, and should not, command the seed to bloom.
Perhaps, in the end, it is precisely this humility, measurement recognizing the limits of what it can know and accomplish, that is itself a profoundly mindful act.
(This post is an English translation of the original Vietnamese article, which can be accessed here: https://tiasang.com.vn/vuot-len-gdp-hanh-phuc-va-chanh-niem-5100474.html).