Breathing Together: Decolonizing Self-Fulfillment and the Filipino Pursuit of Ginhawa in Tourism
Introduction
The Western Promise of Travel
Tourism marketing often revolves around slogans such as “Find Yourself,” popularized by works like Eat Pray Love, alongside the celebrated figure of the “Solo Backpacker.” These motifs frame travel as a path toward self-discovery, drawing heavily from Western ideals of individualism and the promises of positive psychology. Travel appears as a space where emotional renewal and personal growth unfold through curated and immersive experiences.
Within this framing, individualism operates as a guiding principle. It positions personal fulfillment as something attainable through deliberate choices, including the decision to travel. The journey becomes both geographic and inward, suggesting that crossing borders mirrors a movement toward self-actualization. This claim aligns with Agarwal and Singh’s findings (2018), which show how developments in marketing shape travel as a pursuit tied to emotional and economic well-being and as a mechanism for broader social development.
This narrative also fits within a neoliberal frame that emphasizes autonomy, consumer choice, and self-responsibility. Under this logic, spirituality and personal growth risk becoming commodified. Choe and O’Regan’s study (2020) illustrates this trend, showing how spiritual tourism has expanded as travelers seek temporary escape and a sense of deeper meaning. Yet this pursuit can eclipse the effects of tourism on host communities, raising concerns about cultural extraction and the packaging of locality as a consumable experience.
The “Solo Backpacker” image reinforces aspirations toward independence and self-directed adventure. It appeals to travelers who value freedom and mobility, echoing the neoliberal promise of individual empowerment. At the same time, such experiences do not operate evenly across social groups. Bianchi’s work (2016) shows that solo travelers encounter varying levels of satisfaction and dissatisfaction shaped by expectations, social context, and access.
Marketing narratives like “Find Yourself” and the Eat Pray Love trope continue to resonate because they speak to desires for self-exploration and autonomy. Yet they sit within broader economic and social structures that shape what travel means, who can claim these transformative possibilities, and how these stories circulate. These narratives hold space for personal journeys while also reflecting the ideological forces that influence and, at times, constrain travel experiences.
The Problem: The Mismatch
Tourism marketing that foregrounds individualistic self-pursuits does not align well with the Filipino cultural experience. Filipino identity is shaped by collectivist values, in which fulfillment arises from shared presence rather than solitary exploration. In this context, seeking meaning alone can trigger lungkot (sadness) rather than the personal growth promised by Western narratives of self-discovery.
Filipino social life is anchored in family and community. Cruz et al. (2018) describe how Filipino Americans navigate tensions between the individualism emphasized in American society and the collectivism upheld at home, often resulting in identity strain and emotional conflict. This contrast highlights how separation from family can disrupt a core source of stability and belonging, making solitude less a space for insight and more a reminder of distance from valued relationships.
Migration stories further reveal how loneliness shapes Filipino lives in ways that diverge from the romantic appeal of solo travel. Gelvezon (2023) examines the figure of the Bagong Bayani, portraying migrants as self-sacrificing individuals whose efforts gain meaning through family support. Personal identity becomes inseparable from relational commitments, suggesting that quests framed around “finding oneself” in isolation erase the significance of these ties.
The cultural value of pakikisama, which stresses harmony and inclusion, deepens this tension (Castro-Bofill et al., 2016). Attempts to pursue meaning independently can clash with expectations that identity is nurtured through participation in collective life. Eslit (2023) notes that folklore highlighting communal resilience reinforces the enduring role of shared networks as sources of strength. Individualistic journeys risk weakening these emotional anchors.
For many Filipinos, solitary travel is more likely to evoke lungkot than a renewed sense of self. This gap between global tourism narratives and local cultural experience signals the need to rethink how travel is framed, valued, and understood in contexts where community and family ground the very meaning of well-being.
The Thesis Statement
This paper argues that Filipino well-being arises not from a pursuit of Self-Actualization—often framed as an upward trajectory toward individual refinement—but from ginhawa, understood as the expansion of breath, ease, and shared presence. This orientation shifts tourism from a solitary quest for inner truth to a cultural practice aimed at restoring balance. Travel becomes pahinga, a conscious release of accumulated strain, and pakikipagkapwa, a renewal of ties with those who hold significance. These practices illustrate a model of flourishing grounded in relational steadiness, embodied comfort, and collective anchoring rather than imagined ascent toward a perfected self.
Literature Review: The Coloniality of Well-Being
The Hegemony of Maslow’s Pyramid
Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs remains one of the most recognized models for explaining human motivation. The framework arranges needs into a pyramid that begins with basic physiological requirements such as food, water, and shelter, progresses through safety and relational belonging, and ends with esteem and self-actualization. Maslow describes self-actualization as the realization of individual potential and the pursuit of personal growth (Ghaleb, 2024).
Placing self-actualization at the apex signals firm commitments to individual attainment and autonomy. Critics argue that this emphasis elevates personal fulfillment above communal ties, positioning independence as a higher moral or psychological state compared to belonging (Hanley and Abell, 2002). Such an ordering suggests that relational needs occupy a lower developmental status, reinforcing cultural assumptions that prioritize the self over collective life.
This structure also reflects what some describe as a “deficit model” of well-being. In this view, individuals remain in a state of continual striving—seeking higher achievement, broader recognition, or increased status. Ghaleb (2024) notes that this rigid hierarchy overlooks the fluid nature of human needs and may cultivate dissatisfaction when people fail to meet the model’s expectations. The constant pursuit of self-actualization risks creating a cycle in which fulfillment is always deferred.
These dynamics intersect with neoliberal ideals that measure success through productivity, self-interest, and personal advancement. Such framings can downplay the role of community support and shared responsibility—elements central to many conceptions of human flourishing (McCleskey and Ruddell, 2020). They also obscure structural conditions that hinder growth, naturalizing inequalities by locating responsibility within the individual rather than within broader social arrangements (Caplan and Ricciardelli, 2016).
Maslow’s model remains useful as a broad heuristic, yet its hierarchical orientation reinforces individualistic assumptions that may distort understandings of well-being. Prioritizing self-actualization can encourage a perpetual search for personal enhancement at the expense of appreciating present relationships and the social environments that shape human life.
Sikolohiyang Pilipino (Filipino Psychology)
Within Sikolohiyang Pilipino (Filipino Psychology), the concepts of kapwa (shared identity) and ginhawa (ease/prosperity) offer a framework for understanding Filipino subjectivity and social life. Virgilio Enriquez positions kapwa as the core of Filipino identity, describing it as a recognition of shared personhood rather than a boundary between self and other. This orientation shapes how Filipinos interpret relationships, negotiate obligations, and prioritize family and community ties (Pe-Pua and Protacio-Marcelino, 2000).
The idea of ginhawa adds a historical and affective dimension to this relational grounding. Although the provided reference does not attribute the term directly to Zeus Salazar, scholarship in the field commonly notes that ginhawa draws from pre-colonial understandings of well-being. It encompasses physical comfort, emotional ease, and social security, forming a holistic view of prosperity rooted in collective life (Oropilla and Guadana, 2021). This perspective acknowledges how histories of colonization continue to shape experiences of comfort, struggle, and aspiration.
Linguistic analyses deepen this picture. Consuelo Paz, writing on semantic pairs in Filipino languages, contrasts ginhawa with hirap (hardship). Ginhawa signals comfort and relief, while hirap denotes the weight of difficulty and suffering. The tension between these terms reflects the realities Filipinos navigate as they move between ease and strain, often interpreting hardship as a shared concern rather than a purely individual burden (Pe-Pua and Protacio-Marcelino, 2000). This duality foregrounds a collective ethic in which community members contribute to alleviating others’ struggles.
Taken together, kapwa and ginhawa articulate a model of well-being that centers social interdependence, shared identity, and the historical conditions that inform everyday life. These concepts challenge individualistic approaches to well-being by emphasizing that flourishing emerges through relational bonds and the communal pursuit of balance, comfort, and mutual care.
Genealogies of Ginhawa in Philippine Thought
The genealogies of ginhawa in Philippine thought reveal interwoven cultural, historical, and philosophical threads that span indigenous cosmologies, colonial encounters, and contemporary debates on well-being. Ginhawa carries multiple meanings—ease, comfort, relief, and social harmony—and these layers unfold across shifting social contexts.
Precolonial worldviews situate ginhawa within a relational cosmology. Indigenous beliefs emphasize interdependence among persons and between humans and the natural world, grounding well-being in balance and collective harmony. This orientation resonates with kapwa, the shared self central to Filipino social life, where personal well-being depends on the state of one’s relationships and environment. Filipino folk beliefs also articulate a transpersonal worldview in which harmony across realms—human, spiritual, and ecological—supports both individual and communal ginhawa (Cervantes, 2023).
Colonial rule introduced structures that complicated these relational foundations. Administrative systems imposed from outside reshaped governance and constrained forms of self-determination that once supported communal well-being. These legacies continue to influence Filipino subjectivities, with ginhawa emerging as both an aspiration and a site of struggle within broader conversations on identity and social justice (Azada-Palacios, 2024; Dela Cruz, 2020). The persistent tension between indigenous values and colonial residues highlights how ginhawa also functions as a critique of historical disruptions to collective life.
In the present, ginhawa increasingly appears in sociological and political inquiry. Scholars examine how governance failures, policy misalignments, and leadership styles that disregard lived realities impede the pursuit of collective well-being (Casil, 2022; Dela Cruz, 2020). These analyses underscore the need for public policies grounded in local epistemologies rather than imported frameworks that may not align with Filipino aspirations.
Globalization and neoliberal economics further challenge traditional understandings of ginhawa. Market logics and the figure of homo economicus introduce pressures that prioritize profit and individual competition, often at the expense of communal values. These forces can dilute social meanings tied to collective well-being and obscure the relational foundations of ginhawa (Casil, 2022). As a result, contemporary discourse treats ginhawa not simply as comfort but as a lens through which to critique the economic systems and governance strategies that shape Filipino life.
Debates surrounding ginhawa intersect with postcolonial scholarship that seeks to unsettle Western-centric narratives and recover local ways of knowing (Dela Cruz, 2020; Gunaratne, 2010). This work positions ginhawa as a concept that bridges indigenous traditions and contemporary realities, offering a vocabulary to articulate Filipino experiences outside imported psychological or developmental models.
Amid ongoing negotiations of identity and social change, ginhawa remains central to how Filipinos imagine and pursue well-being. Its genealogies illuminate a vision of comfort and ease that rests on collective conditions, historical awareness, and the preservation of relational worlds that sustain everyday life.
Theoretical Framework: Redefining the Goal
Deconstructing Ginhawa
Ginhawa carries meanings that extend far beyond its standard translation as ‘comfort’ or ‘ease’. Its linguistic root, hininga, refers to breath—the basic marker of life and the source of one’s ability to move, act, and relate. Anchoring ginhawa in breath situates it in the body rather than in abstract reflection. It points to a condition arising from the physical rhythms of daily living.
This bodily grounding becomes visible in the ways people describe the experience. Expressions such as magaan ang pakiramdam highlight sensations of lightness and release. The body, not just the mind, signals the return of balance and openness. These descriptions show that ginhawa is a sensory state shaped by the pressures and supports within one’s surroundings, not a detached internal sentiment.
Its relational dimension is just as important. Ginhawa does not stop at the boundary of the self. It responds to the state of others and moves with the conditions of one’s social world. The idea that you cannot feel at ease if your family is hungry reveals how permeable the experience is. Your own comfort depends on the well-being of those connected to you. This challenges models of well-being that assume people can pursue fulfillment apart from their relationships.
Taken together, these features present ginhawa as a framework where breath, bodily feeling, and shared life intersect. It offers you a culturally grounded way to understand why Filipino well-being cannot be reduced to individual self-actualization and why travel gains meaning when it restores balance across both personal and relational spheres.
The Binary: Sikip vs. Luwag
The contrast between sikip and luwag provides a straightforward way to understand how Filipinos describe pressure, longing, and the embodied search for ease. These terms reach beyond physical space; they show how emotional states, social demands, and bodily sensations come together to shape daily experience.
Sikip (Tightness): Sikip describes the feeling of being compressed by circumstance. It appears in accounts of crowded cities, unstable finances, and emotional overload. Phrases such as naninikip ang dibdib show how strain is felt directly in the body as heaviness and restriction. Sikip marks moments when responsibilities pile up, movement narrows, and breathing feels labored.
Luwag (Looseness/Space): Luwag signals a widening of breath, movement, and possibility. People associate it with slow-paced settings, open views, and a sense of regained capacity. It connects closely to ginhawa because luwag brings clarity, comfort, and the reassuring presence of others. When there is luwag, the body settles, and the mind follows.
Tourism often expresses a shift from sikip to luwag. Travelers step away from dense, demanding environments such as Manila or high-pressure workplaces to seek places that restore their breath. Beaches, provinces, and rural retreats offer room not only for personal rest but also for shared renewal among companions. The trip becomes a movement from compression to release, grounding travel in embodied and relational recovery rather than in a solitary search for escape.
Analysis: Tourism as Pahinga
The Physiological Necessity of Travel (Iso-Ahola’s Escape Dimension)
Travel functions as a physiological reset in a setting where daily life is shaped by tight schedules, long commutes, and labor systems that exhaust both breath and energy. Approaching vacation as pahinga recognizes it as a necessary form of recovery shaped by historical and material pressures. Centuries of extraction and the demands of contemporary capitalism have produced conditions where rest is limited. Travel, in this context, restores the diminished hininga that supports Filipino well-being.
Many Filipino travelers describe their desire to travel through the longing for sariwang hangin or “fresh air.” This longing carries bodily and symbolic weight. On a physical level, the appeal of mountain air, sea breeze, and rural quiet responds to the need to expand the chest, loosen built-up tightness, and counter the “sikip” of urban environments. Seeking sariwang hangin becomes a search for atmospheric relief—cleaner air, calmer rhythms, and open sensory space.
Symbolically, sariwang hangin is a break from environments that constrict, rush, and overwhelm. Expressions like ang hirap huminga sa Maynila convey how social pressures are felt as a literal difficulty breathing. Leaving the city for open landscapes becomes an embodied response to these conditions. Breath stands in for agency: to breathe with ease is to regain the capacity to act, feel, relate, and imagine.
These somatic shifts point directly to ginhawa. An expanding chest, relaxed muscles, and a renewed sense of space signal physical comfort as well as emotional clarity and restored relational presence. Recovering breath becomes intertwined with recovering the self within a network of responsibilities and ties. In this sense, tourism as pahinga emerges as a form of healing that addresses the bodily depletion of labor and the emotional constriction created by social strain.
Gana (Appetite) and Vitality
Food is central to how Filipinos recover vitality during travel. When you understand gana as appetite, zest, and a renewed desire for living, eating becomes a core pathway through which ginhawa is experienced. Travel interrupts routines that wear down appetite—stress, rushed schedules, and fragmented meals—and creates conditions where the body can respond to food with renewed eagerness. In this view, food tourism reflects an embodied return of energy and pleasure rather than a checklist of cultural encounters.
This renewal of gana emerges through relationships. Filipino travelers often seek meals that invite shared presence and collective enjoyment. The boodle fight illustrates this vividly: people gather around banana leaves, eat with their hands, and set aside the social restraints that shape everyday dining. The ease of walang hiya-hiya opens emotional space for laughter, closeness, and a sense of plenty that strengthens both appetite and connection.
These practices show how food restores more than physical hunger. Eating together supports emotional clarity and relational ease. What returns is not only the desire to eat but the desire to rejoin social life with energy, openness, and warmth. In this way, gana becomes a key expression of ginhawa, revealing how nourishment, sociality, and embodied comfort come together in Filipino travel.
Analysis: Tourism as Pakikipagkapwa
The Myth of the Solo Traveler (Urry’s Tourist Gaze vs. Collective Gaze)
The solo traveler stands as a prominent figure in Western tourism narratives. It represents autonomy, self-mastery, and the willingness to detach from social expectations. Filipino travel practices offer a contrasting orientation, one rooted in relational presence rather than individual withdrawal. Filipinos commonly travel in groups—extended families, barangay circles, barkada networks, or multigenerational clusters. This pattern reflects not a deficit in independence but a cultural understanding that ease, safety, and enjoyment emerge through proximity to others.
Group travel shows how kapwa shapes leisure as profoundly as it shapes daily life. Familiar companions provide emotional security, share responsibilities, and allow travelers to experience pleasure and challenge together. The group acts as a vessel of care: someone manages logistics, others look after children, and each person contributes food, conversation, or humor. Travel strengthens rather than suspends these ties, making the journey an intensified expression of collective life.
This collective orientation also shifts how leisure environments are sensed. Where many Western visitors read a crowded beach as stressful or competitive, Filipino travelers often interpret the same scene as saya—a joyful atmosphere created by chatter, music, and the visible presence of other families. Noise becomes a sign of social vitality. Crowds signal safety and familiarity, marking a place as shared and trusted. Silence, in contrast, may feel unsettling or lonely.
These differences challenge the assumption that solitude and quiet are universal markers of meaningful travel. For many Filipinos, fulfillment does not require stepping away from others; it arises from immersion in familiar relational rhythms. Treating the solo traveler as a universal ideal obscures how well-being is culturally patterned and sustained through shared presence.
Balikbayan: The Return as the Ultimate Journey (VFR)
The figure of the balikbayan offers a clear counterpoint to Western narratives that frame travel as a search for novelty, distance, or unfamiliar terrain. In the Filipino imagination, the journey that carries the most profound meaning is not outward but homeward. Returning holds emotional, moral, and relational significance: it repairs ties stretched by work, time, and migration. For overseas workers and migrants, going home is not only a physical act of crossing borders but a reweaving of kinship obligations that anchor Filipino social life.
This emphasis on return reframes travel as a practice of reconnection. When a balikbayan comes home, the journey fulfills shared rather than individual expectations. Families adjust schedules, plan gatherings, and prepare to exchange stories and presence. Travel becomes a way to mend and strengthen relational bonds, producing fulfillment through restored balance rather than through independent self-discovery.
The balikbayan box further clarifies this orientation. Often misinterpreted as a token of consumerism, the box is better seen as a container of care that extends ginhawa to those at home. Its groceries, clothes, treats, and practical goods reflect attention to the needs and preferences of kin. Sending a box softens the emotional distance created by labor migration and redistributes the gains of work abroad. It turns economic labor into a moral practice of providing and sustaining.
Viewed this way, the balikbayan box operates as a relational technology that bridges separation. It embodies pakikipagkapwa, affirming that well-being is shared rather than solitary. Whether through physical homecoming or the steady flow of boxes, the act of returning expresses a form of travel rooted in care, reciprocity, and collective thriving. Filipino mobility, seen through this lens, shows that the goal of travel is not the accumulation of new experiences but the circulation of comfort, belonging, and ginhawa across social ties.
Pasalubong vs. Souvenir: The Economics of Care
The contrast between the Western souvenir and the Filipino pasalubong reveals distinct cultural logics around memory, obligation, and affection. In many Western tourism settings, souvenirs function as personal markers. It validates the traveler’s presence at a destination and serves as a token of individual experience—an object that declares, “I was here.” Its value lies in its self-referential quality. Souvenirs consolidate personal identity, display mobility, and signal cultural capital, making them instruments of individual storytelling and self-making.
The Filipino pasalubong follows a different relational and moral economy. Its purpose is not to preserve personal memory but to restore connection. Giving pasalubong communicates, “I thought of you,” turning the object into a gesture that eases the distance created by absence. The act softens the hiya associated with enjoying leisure or earning abroad while others remain at home and smooths the traveler’s reintegration into the group upon return. Pasalubong reflects the expectation that mobility should yield benefits not only for the traveler but also for those linked through kinship, friendship, and shared life.
Viewed this way, buying pasalubong is not an afterthought. It is central to the meaning of the trip because it redistributes the ginhawa gained from travel to those who could not accompany the journey. The comfort, rest, and joy experienced on the road become shareable goods—passed on as food items, small gifts, or practical necessities. Pasalubong, then, operates as a relational technology of care. It turns travel into a collective accomplishment and reinforces pakikipagkapwa by ensuring that the benefits of mobility circulate beyond the self, sustaining the ties that anchor Filipino life.
Suki: Relational Decision Making over Novelty (Plog’s Familiarity Dimension)
Tourism scholarship often assumes that travelers seek novelty and authenticity, mirroring Western orientations that frame the unfamiliar as a pathway to self-development. The search for a “hidden gem,” the avoidance of “tourist traps,” and the desire to curate a unique itinerary reflect this pursuit of distinction, where travel becomes a stage for individualized narratives and cultural display.
Filipino tourists frequently operate through a different logic—one grounded in relational trust rather than novelty. Choosing a suki, whether a long-time vendor, a resort owner familiar to the family, or a service provider who has built rapport over the years, reflects a preference for stability, comfort, and reciprocal ties. Returning to a suki minimizes the uncertainties that accompany unfamiliar environments and interactions. In multigenerational travel groups, reducing uncertainty is not simply efficient; it is a practice of care.
The preference for a suki shows how ginhawa is generated through predictability and relational assurance. When someone remembers your family, anticipates your needs, or offers dagdag—a small extra—or a discount, the exchange becomes more than a commercial transaction. It affirms mutual recognition and ongoing connection. These gestures cultivate belonging, in contrast to Western ideals that valorize risk, novelty, and individual initiative.
Relational decision-making also reshapes how destinations are judged. Filipinos may choose where to stay, eat, or return based on who they know rather than what is new. Tourism becomes a way to maintain and renew social networks. Familiarity provides ease, trust offers protection, and the suki relationship extends ginhawa across different places.
Seen this way, the Filipino inclination toward suki is not a rejection of exploration but an affirmation that well-being is anchored in relationships. The comfort of returning signals not limited imagination but a culturally grounded strategy for ensuring that travel fosters ease, connection, and continuity—values central to Filipino flourishing.
Decolonizing the Industry
Policy Implications
A decolonial approach to tourism governance calls for reexamining the assumptions embedded in dominant industry practices and marketing narratives. Policies shaped by Western ideals tend to privilege adventure, solitude, and individualized consumption. These orientations overlook the relational and collective foundations of Filipino travel. Reorienting the industry toward a framework grounded in ginhawa requires recognizing that Filipino fulfillment grows from shared presence rather than isolation.
Marketing strategies should center on family, reunion, and collective enjoyment rather than promoting rugged independence or solitary exploration as universal aspirations. Campaigns can highlight multigenerational trips, homecomings, and communal leisure as core expressions of travel. Doing so challenges the colonial hierarchy that elevates Western preferences while rendering Filipino patterns of mobility secondary or invisible.
Infrastructure must also reflect culturally grounded ways of traveling. Large-group accommodations, communal areas such as picnic sheds, and flexible spaces designed for extended families address the actual needs of Filipino travelers. These adjustments question architectural defaults—like the couple-oriented table-for-two or the minimalist solo pod—that assume a specific type of traveler and foreground individualized consumption.
Recognizing suki networks as legitimate foundations of tourism sustainability further broadens the definition of success. Repeat visits fueled by trust, familiarity, and reciprocity support local economies and strengthen community well-being. These relationships illustrate forms of loyalty that extend beyond transactional exchange, showing that sustainable tourism can grow from stable social ties rather than from continual market expansion.
Conclusion
Restating the Thesis
Filipino well-being arises not from striving toward an individualized ideal of self-actualization but from cultivating ginhawa—a condition anchored in breath, relational steadiness, and shared presence. The analyses throughout this paper illustrate that tourism becomes meaningful for Filipinos when it restores the body from strain, strengthens social ties, and circulates comfort across kinship networks. This framework offers a culturally grounded and socially embedded account of fulfillment that contrasts with models emphasizing autonomy, novelty, or personal transcendence, by reframing travel as pahinga and pakikipagkapwa, ginhawa positions tourism within the ethical and relational commitments that shape Filipino life.
Final Thought
Travel, when viewed through ginhawa, is not a solitary quest for identity but a collective effort to regain ease after periods of hardship. Its purpose extends beyond the self. As this paper has argued, we do not travel merely to locate an inner truth; we travel to restore breath, reaffirm belonging, and carry comfort home to those who rely on us.
We travel not to find ourselves, but to ensure that we—and our kin—can breathe easier.
Social Dimensions of Ginhawa
The social grounding of Ginhawa is central to the Filipino experience, where well-being emerges from the strength of community ties. Research on social support consistently shows that meaningful relationships contribute to higher levels of happiness and life satisfaction. Practices such as festivals, shared meals, and neighborhood gatherings express this social foundation. These activities sustain bonds, affirm cultural identity, and meet emotional needs by creating spaces where people feel recognized and connected (Keyes, 2007).
Questions of Ginhawa also intersect with broader social structures. Resource allocation, access to opportunities, and patterns of inequality shape how people experience ease or strain in daily life. When disparities persist, the ability to attain Ginhawa is limited, underscoring the need for collective action to reduce systemic burdens. Building social environments grounded in respect, fairness, and mutual care strengthens the conditions that support well-being. Such efforts show how community-driven responses can ease individual hardship and cultivate shared comfort (Rada, 2020).