Who gets to flourish?

Are you flourishing? Not “just getting by” or “making it through,” but truly thriving? In the last two decades, the field of positive psychology has embraced the concept of flourishing, the pinnacle of well-being. Distinct from subjective happiness or physical health, flourishing is the aggregate of all life experiences when every aspect of your life is going well. “A state in which all aspects of a person’s life are good,” says Brendan Case, the associate director for research at Harvard’s Human Flourishing Program. As impossible as it may seem, to flourish is to feel satisfactory, inside and out, about your relationships, income, work, health, and passions, and to extend that virtuous spirit to others.

In 2021, flourishing — and its opposite, languishing — reached wider audiences when a New York Times article distinguished between the way some people felt during the pandemic (“joyless and aimless”) and what could be if you were flourishing (“a strong sense of meaning, mastery and mattering to others”). That same year, the team behind the Global Flourishing Study, a collaboration between the Human Flourishing Program and Baylor’s Institute for Studies of Religion, refined the questionnaire researchers would give to participants in studies of flourishing worldwide. What was once a somewhat niche concept hit the global cultural zeitgeist.

Even if the terminology seems novel, the tenets of flourishing have long been mainstream and widely discussed. As more people aspire to “the good life,” they, perhaps unintentionally, have been thinking about what it means to flourish. “Flourishing is in itself a little bit of a technical concept, philosophical concept. It’s not something we necessarily use a lot as a concept in everyday life,” says Eri Mountbatten-O’Malley, a senior lecturer in education studies at Bath Spa University and author of the forthcoming book, Human Flourishing: A Conceptual Analysis. “But if we’re talking about meaning in life and happiness and personal growth and things like that, we’re often really talking about flourishing.”

If the pandemic has taught us anything, it’s that despite all our best intentions, we can’t simply manifest a flourishing life. Some hurdles may hold people back from reaching this idealized existence. In an unequal world, where modern ways of living do more to divide than unify, can true flourishing be attained? Or is it simply another empty pursuit of wellness, another thing to optimize?

If flourishing is “feeling good combined with functioning well,” according to Corey Keyes, a sociologist and professor emeritus at Emory University, there are a number of areas of life in which we can either thrive or flounder. The Human Flourishing Program defined six domains that contribute to overall flourishing: happiness and life satisfaction, mental and physical health, meaning and purpose, character and virtue, close social relationships, and financial and material stability.

While interconnected, we can flourish in one area, such as close social relationships, but fall short in others, like financial stability. Strong connections to our families, jobs, education, and religious communities have been shown to positively impact mental and physical health, levels of life satisfaction, and financial security and therefore contribute to whether one feels they are flourishing, according to a 2017 paper by the Human Flourishing Program’s director Tyler VanderWeele. (VanderWeele declined to be interviewed for this story.) Other avenues to flourishing, VanderWeele notes in that paper, include enjoying the arts and involvement in other communities outside of organized religion.

A 2022 study found that social support, stable income, self-worth, family, meaningful work, and social determinants of health (which include “access to food, housing, transportation, and education; neighborhood and physical environment; sense of safety; government institutions; exposure to the police/justice system; discrimination; and structural oppression”) were the top contributors to individual flourishing. These contributors are largely out of one’s control and can make flourishing difficult for those who do not have a steady income, a safe home, or are discriminated against.

Some overlooked factors, according to one of the study’s authors, Sarah Willen, include being recognized and respected for who we are and having the ability to shape the world around us, whether through voting or having the opportunity to speak at a school board meeting. She also stresses the importance of education, libraries, and the visual and performing arts. “A society that supports flourishing is a society in which there are lots and lots of opportunities for people to come together in communities, and they might be religious or they might be social, they might be around a particular cause,” says Willen, an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Connecticut. “But all of these opportunities to connect with people who are different from us are opportunities to broaden our horizons.”

Flourishing isn’t a selfish pursuit, says geriatric psychiatrist Dilip Jeste, the director of the Global Research Network on Social Determinants of Mental Health and Exposomics. Prioritizing personal wellness at the expense of others does little to promote collective flourishing. “Of course, we want people to be happy,” he says. “But if it’s strictly based on selfish life satisfaction, and not taking into account other people’s satisfaction, that won’t be as good for society as a whole.”

Collectively, a flourishing society is one where many of its inhabitants have the means to thrive. A given group, from cities to book clubs, flourishes as much as its individual members. “A society that systematically privileges the flourishing of some tiny minority of its members at the expense of the flourishing of the vast majority is not a flourishing society,” Case says. “That’s a society that’s failing in some very profound way.” Much like wealth, some people have the means to dedicate time and resources to their life’s purpose or mental health, enabling those with steady jobs or who aren’t discriminated against to have a smoother path toward flourishing.

No individual or society can flourish on a planet in decay, either. “I can’t carry around my own little bubble of clean air that is hermetically sealed off from the air that everybody else has to breathe,” Case says. An earth that is uninhabitable to those in extreme climates is not a flourishing world.

Beyond broad approaches to personal flourishing, Mountbatten-O’Malley says it can be more beneficial to consider whether we’re flourishing in specific contexts. To flourish overall is different from flourishing in the respective roles of a parent, student, employee, or soccer player. Contextualizing flourishing, he says, can help people better understand how it applies to their individual lives.

A supposed lack of effort — toward building a family or finding enriching employment — isn’t to blame for a personal state of languishing. We exist in societies rife with inequities and injustices that are not always conducive to universal flourishing. The respondents in Willen’s study reported racism, finances, and lack of access to food, housing, education, and stable income as barriers to their personal flourishing. “Women and those who were older, white, highly educated, and higher income were more likely to report flourishing,” Willen and her co-authors wrote.

About half of Black respondents considered themselves flourishing, compared to two-thirds of white respondents; similarly, less than half of interviewees with family income less than $30,000 said they were flourishing, compared to 88 percent of those with family income over $100,000. Other people Willen and her team spoke with said “serious mental or physical illness, substance dependence, incarceration, debt, prolonged unemployment, homelessness, or the death of a close relative” impeded their ability to flourish. Those with severe mental and physical disabilities may find it difficult to flourish if they are heavily reliant on caretakers, says Mountbatten-O’Malley.

Age may also color how we view our lives. Younger Americans report lower levels of well-being across multiple domains (happiness, meaning, health, relationships, financial stability, and character), according to research from 2022. Two potential reasons, according to Case, include the digital revolution (and the tendency for young people to turn to their virtual life over their flesh-and-blood one) and the loss of millions of manufacturing jobs and subsequent stagnation of wages. “In the few decades following the Second World War, it was actually pretty common [for kids] in mill towns in Ohio or Pennsylvania or Michigan to be able to count on growing up in a medium-sized town and finding a pretty decent job right out of high school in a factory nearby,” Case says, “and that’s just not possible anymore.”

Although the world around us affects our ability to flourish, so does our perception of how we fit into that world. On paper, we might meet the conditions for flourishing: a good-paying job, enriching relationships, decent health, and a sense of purpose. But we may still notice a disconnect between where we are and where we’d like to be. One interviewee in Willen’s study remarked, “I’m highly productive and successful, but there’s very little recognition because I’m a middle-aged overweight woman. If I was a between-30-and-40-year-old white man, it’s the greatest thing in the world.” Alternatively, a highly successful business owner with a picturesque life may appear to be thriving, but if the company abuses and exploits its workers, and the owner knows and condones it, they are not flourishing, according to Mountbatten-O’Malley. “You can’t flourish by harming other people,” he says.

Modern life makes satisfying the basic tenets of flourishing difficult, says Keyes, the sociologist and author of the forthcoming book, Languishing: How To Feel Alive Again in a World That Wears Us Down. If we don’t feel connected to our communities — the buildings we live in, the gyms we sweat in, the schools we learn in — nor feel like we contribute meaningfully to society, we’re not apt to flourish. Overscheduled routines mean less time for challenging extracurriculars that encourage growth. “It is very hard to find time in your life to do these things because life itself no longer does these things for us at work or at home,” Keyes says.

Our well-being is not wholly dependent on our circumstances. Despite life’s challenges, people are resilient, Keyes says. “Sometimes you will find flourishing in places where you would least suspect it,” he says. Keyes has identified five areas — “I call them the five vitamins” — where individuals can focus to encourage flourishing, regardless of income.

Aside from the shifts individuals can make to lead a more flourishing life, the societies in which we live can allow for more people to grow. “We have to have a conversation about where we put our resources as a society,” Willen says. “What we prioritize and what we care about and what we fund.” Governments must continue to support libraries and schools, not only as avenues for education but as locations where people gather and seek shelter, as well as public broadcasting and endowments for artists, Willen says. Individual commitments to the democratic process, such as voting, can strengthen a society’s ability to flourish, she adds.

For communities to flourish, their leaders must act with integrity, Mountbatten-O’Malley says, in service of the people they represent and not their own interests. Policies that promote social mobility over economic growth, such as those in Nordic countries, can further promote societal well-being. “At the moment,” Mountbatten-O’Malley says, “the focus of policies is on driving the economy. And that is almost always going to be at the expense of the human being.”

In his 2017 paper, VanderWeele makes similar suggestions for societal flourishing, including “an efficient and effective government, a well-functioning financial system, the absence of corruption, and civic stability” — all fixes coming from the top.

Despite the obstacles, individuals should feel empowered. Although the standard for overall flourishing can seem nearly unattainable, it’s still worth aspiring to. A life in which we feel we are making a difference and are learning and engaging with others is to flourish. Rather than using the various domains of flourishing as concrete metrics to measure ourselves against, we can instead work toward becoming a little more fulfilled in one area of life. While the concept of flourishing may, at first blush, appear reserved for the white, wealthy, and powerful, Keyes believes everyone has the potential to thrive.

“To flourish is to protest modern life in its boldest way,” he says. “Show the world that it’s vacuous and that you have a better way of doing the life that you have right now.”