Smart classrooms. Smart cities. Smart houses. Smart phones. Smart watches. Smart TVs. Smart cars. Dumb people. They are everywhere. All of them. This is how historians will remember the 21st century: smart things, stupid people.

Smart objects make life easier and better. With help from technology we can be more productive. Organizations can be more efficient. Wouldn’t it be nice if people contributed to our well-being as much as smart technologies do? It would, I know. But we seem to be investing so much more in smart gadgets than in smart people. How about a psychologically smart workplace, or an interpersonally smart partner? How about a smart team member, or a smart boss? To be perfectly clear, I am not talking about verbal or analytical smart, I’m talking about people smart, as in getting along with others and solving problems together. I’m talking about making life easier and better for everyone, not SAT, ACT, GRE, GPA, L-SAT, M-CAT or FAQ-U smart.

The holiday season can be one of belonging. But it can also be a season of just longing. While many people have an opportunity to spend time with family, and experience love and warmth, there are others who only long to belong. Those who live alone feel especially forgotten when they know that the rest of the world is celebrating the joy of love. Isolation is such a problem that the United Kingdom recently appointed a minister in charge of loneliness. The UK is not alone. This is a universal problem, especially among the elderly.

To make all social action significant and meaningful I suggest the concept of wellfair, which combines wellness with fairness. Whereas wellness is often the target of ameliorative efforts, fairness is the object of transformative ones. Wellfair calls for the indivisibility of wellness and fairness, of happiness and justice, of health and access, of effort and opportunities. Wellfair challenges the duality of internal or external change, of personal improvement or social betterment. We must actively embrace the and; we must repudiate the either/or.

The Urge to Add Value to the Community goes from Volunteering to #BlackLivesMatter

In The Psychology of Citizenship and Civic Engagement (2015), my friend Mark Pancer noted that “making a difference” was one of the most common motivations shared by volunteers and activists in hundreds of interviews that his research team conducted. Indeed, his book is full of references to that refrain. There are plenty of signs that individuals all over the world willingly give of their time and money to help others in need. For example, in the United States alone, about 30% of the population volunteer, which is close to 77 million people. Over the past 15 years, people in the United States volunteered close to 120 billion hours. This amounts to $2.8 trillion. On average, they volunteer about 32 hours per year, which amounts to 7.9 billion hours of service. In terms of money, this is the equivalent of $184 billion. Reports indicate that people of all ages and all racial and ethnic backgrounds volunteer.

Inequality leads to devaluation of worth and personal and social problems

Discrimination and prejudice send a clear message that some people are valued more than others. This inequality of worth can be created by a number of social identifiers: money, race, class, education, disability, gender orientation, beauty, language or ethnic origin. The ones with more money, beauty, education or privilege possess more social status. Low social status causes stress, and stress leads to poor quality of life. In a series of groundbreaking epidemiological studies, Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett have shown the deleterious impact of inequality at the state, national, and international levels. The results can be seen in their 2018 book The inner level: How more equal societies reduce stress, restore sanity and improve everyone’s well-being.

Lack of Mattering Can Lead to Social Progress or Decay

Depending on social and political dynamics, the pain associated with feeling devalued can lead to social progress or decay. When civil rights activists organized to pass legislation to advance the well-being of Blacks, and when people with disabilities advocated for the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act, social progress was achieved. These were fights for fairness mounted by people without power. But when certain groups in power feel threatened, instead of creating bridges of belonging they erect walls of exclusion. Instead of extending wellness to all, they hoard opportunities. They are quick to abandon bridging social capital in favor of extreme bonding. When that happens, we end up with populist nationalism, xenophobia, prejudice and racial intolerance.

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