Living Well Is Not Living Better

Development, growth, standard of living, quality of life: we measure existence by a slope we must climb, always one rung higher than yesterday and our neighbor. In the Andean highlands, around Lake Titicaca, another language names something else. The Aymara word suma qamaña—and its Quechua twin sumak kawsay—does not say one must live better. It says one must live well, and the gap between the two is the whole point.

Aymara jurist and writer Fernando Huanacuni Mamani gathered its meaning for an Andean Indigenous organization, the CAOI. He warns from the outset that vivir bien is a poor translation: Spanish—and French in its wake—falls short of what the ancestral language holds in two words. Yet this is what he renders:

Spanish

El término aymara “suma qamaña” se traduce como “vivir bien” o “vivir en plenitud”, que en términos generales significa “vivir en armonía y equilibrio; en armonía con los ciclos de la Madre Tierra, del cosmos, de la vida y de la historia, y en equilibrio con toda forma de existencia”.

English

The Aymara term suma qamaña translates as “living well” or “living in fullness,” which broadly means “living in harmony and balance; in harmony with the cycles of Mother Earth, the cosmos, life, and history, and in balance with all forms of existence.”

The word resists reduction to a happiness slogan. Huanacuni separates its two roots: suma, fullness, what is complete and fulfilled; qamaña, the act of living, but also of co-living, of being while being, of dwelling with. Living well, then, is not a state one achieves alone, once one’s needs are met. It is a way of holding within a web of relations—and the first of these relations is not with other humans.

What strikes in the phrase is the scope of the community. The balance sought is not “with others” as we understand it—the society of humans. It is “with all forms of existence”: the cycles of the earth, its seasons of sowing and fallow, the cosmos, life, history itself. For Huanacuni, community is not a social structure made of people; it is made of all that exists, and the human is but one thread among others. Suma qamaña does not ask to be happy: it asks to be attuned to this whole greater than oneself.

Here, Huanacuni draws the dividing line. Suma qamaña has a false twin, and he takes care not to confuse them: “living better.”

Spanish

El Vivir Bien no es lo mismo que el vivir mejor, el vivir mejor es a costa del otro. Vivir mejor es egoísmo, desinterés por los demás, individualismo, sólo pensar en el lucro.

English

Living-well is not the same as living-better; living-better comes at the expense of others. Living better is selfishness, indifference to others, individualism, thinking only of profit.

“Living better” is comparative: one lives better only more than someone else, and thus at their expense. For a minority to live better, Huanacuni says, multitudes must live poorly—this is the very grammar of accumulation, which sorts the world into winners and losers. “Living well” does not compare: it seeks a fullness no one must pay for, because it is measured by the balance of the whole, not the void one carves in a neighbor or the earth. The bottomless hunger that drives us to always want more is not a motor here: it is precisely what suma qamaña guards against.

One might be tempted to recognize our own recent terms—sobriety, joyful frugality, the art of living with less. The resemblance is real, but it must be held at arm’s length before trusting it. Our sobrieties remain, more often than not, choices of individuals adjusting their consumption; they start from the subject and their relationship to goods. Suma qamaña does not start from the subject: it starts from the community extended to all life, and it is this community, not the individual, that sets the measure of the good. This is not a gentler version of the same world—it is another root.

What remains is a question the word poses without closing. We have learned to ask: How to live better?—and the answer has always taken the form of more. Suma qamaña asks something else: Am I in balance with what surrounds and sustains me? The difference is not one of degree. It is the difference between a life one climbs and a life one tunes.