What Does a Flourishing Life Look Like
What does it mean to flourish in life and what is needed make it happen
Are you flourishing in your life? If you are happy watching Netflix and playing video games and eating fattening food then all power to you, but that’s not what I would call flourishing. To flourish means you are growing, prospering, overcoming, building, making yourself anew. To flourish means challenging yourself to engage with the world to solve problems and to work towards overcoming your own limitations
I recently read Mass Flourishing by Edmund Phelps that explores this topic on the individual level up to the whole societal level. I think it’s a key book to understanding contemporary life from the technological stagnation that began in the 1970s to the mental health epidemics we see today. I think very few of us are able to flourish because few of us can live The Good Life.
The Good Life
“The good life requires the intellectual growth that comes from actively engaging the world and the moral growth that comes from creating and exploring in the face of great uncertainty.”
Edmund Phelps, Mass Flourishing
The Good Life is–a philosophical question of what kind of life a person should aspire to, and actually live. Different philosophers and religions throughout history ask and present an answer to this question. You might say that today we have a cultural tendency to see the good life in a hedonistic way: living a good life means maximum pleasure and wealth for minimum discomfort and effort. But this question comes down to a debate between what the “good” in the good life is referring to. If it refers to a sense of pleasure then the hedonistic way would seem appropriate at first glance, but if it is broader and is referring to what is good in an ethical sense then it clearly isn’t.
Is a sadistic killer living the good life if they are able to satisfy their hedonism through murder? If they’re thoroughly happy in doing it then who are we to say? Different strokes for different folks. But I think all of us understand that there has to be some kind of broader, non-subjective ethical quality to what the good life is. To live the good life means being ethically good not just to your self and your own needs and desires, but to the needs and desires of others.
On Love
Love might seem like a strange place to take this, but I think it is vital to understand flourishing. I’m not talking about erotic love, but the kind of love you have for yourself, for a partner, for your friends, or for your children. Erich Fromm described love as “the active concern for the life and the growth of that which we love. Where this active concern is lacking, there is no love.” It is the concern for growth that we need to explore. A rich friend who will never have to work a day in their life will likely have no need for your concern over their well-being as long as they stay healthy, but having all that wealth doesn’t mean they’ll ever grow, and if you love that person you should be concerned about their growth.
Living the good life requires you love both others and yourself. To love yourself requires you are concerned with your own growth as a person. To grow requires escaping routine and ease–a plant does not grow by staying in the ground inside the seed. To grow requires trying new things, going into the unknown, overcoming challenges, and becoming the best you can become. The mythologist, Joseph Campbell, would say you need a Call to Adventure. Abraham Maslowe (creator of Maslowe’s hierarchy of needs) described this process of growth as “self-actualization.”
“What a man can be, he must be. This need we may call self-actualization.
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It refers to the desire for self fulfillment, namely, to the tendency for him to become actualized in what he is potentially. This tendency might be phrased as the desire to become more and more what one is, to become everything that one is capable of becoming.”
Abraham Maslowe, A Theory of Human Motivation
To live the good life and flourish requires taking risks. Where you are certain you will succeed there is likely no room for growth. It is only when you are trying something where you don’t know if you’ll succeed–where you are taking a risk–that you will grow. If you are not growing and you find yourself stagnant in your personal and professional life, then you are not taking enough risks and you are not showing yourself enough love. You need courage to live the good life and you can’t expect you’ll be confident in what you are doing when you are truly growing. I wrote about the difference between courage and confidence and why this is the case.
You can’t shy away from challenges in life because that leads to stagnation. Instead, embrace them. Enjoy facing new trials and pushing yourself to overcome them. One habit you can embrace to help with this mental shift is to stop saying you “have to” do something and instead say you “get to” do something.
“... we often talk about everything we have to do in a given day. You have to wake up early for work. You have to make another sales call for your business. You have to cook dinner for your family. Now, imagine changing just one word: You don’t “have” to. You “get” to. You get to wake up early for work. You get to make another sales call for your business. You get to cook dinner for your family. By simply changing one word, you shift the way you view each event. You transition from seeing these behaviors as burdens and turn them into opportunities.”
James Clear, Atomic Habits
Few (or perhaps no one) ever fully self-actualizes, and I think it’s safe to say that many people flourish in life despite not being self-actualized. You can flourish without reaching that full potential. What matters more is the sense of satisfaction that comes with the journey towards that destination: experiencing new insights, new challenges, and new achievements.
There is another quality of life that is necessary for living the good life and flourishing: a feeling of worth or value. You have to feel like your life and what you are doing in your life is worthwhile. Here again we find the necessity of love. You only love that which you value. If you do not value someone then you do not love them, and that goes for loving yourself. The feeling of living a worthwhile life can only come through loving yourself.
That value goes another way. The flourishing person doesn’t just value themself and what they’re doing, but they offer something to their families and communities that is valued. A flourishing person loves themself, and is also loved by others. What they give to the world is valued and needed, and the feeling of being valued by others is something we all need. How many relationships fail because one or both partners does not feel needed or valued? We need to feel needed. This begs the question of whether a hermit can flourish? Is it possible to be a flourishing person with a community of just the self? I do not know the answer to this, but I lean towards no.
Mastery, Agency, and Freedom
“The psychologist Abraham Maslow in a much-read 1943 paper drew up a hierarchy of human needs, starting with the most basic.8 In this hierarchy, he gives a place to the need to acquire “mastery” of a trade or skill—typically after some apprenticeship. This need comes immediately after the physiological needs at the base and, next up the ladder, security needs.”
Edmund Phelps, Mass Flourishing
Giving something to the world that others value is not a truly selfless act. I’m not necessarily talking about money however, though valued professions often (though not always) provide high pay. To improve your value to others relies on mastery. The more you master a skill, a profession, or a role, the more value you are able to provide to the world. Mastery enables a person to overcome greater challenges, solve greater problems, and fills them with a sense of independence. The greater your mastery, the more needed you’ll feel.
A doctor is valued because they save lives, and a good mother or father is valued because they lovingly raise good children, a volunteer at a food bank is valued by the community, a programmer is valued for the software they produce for the world. All those positions are valued by others even if not all are paid. Likewise not all well paid positions are actually valued by anyone besides their company stockholders–not all well paid positions offer something valuable to society.
“People start their working life with a stock of knowledge, of course, and gain much new knowledge in solving the problems that typically arise. To succeed in their work or their business they have to be able to meet its technical demands: problem solving is a factor in one’s success. The considerable knowledge acquired in the process is generally gratifying, no matter that it was not sought for its own sake. It provides a sense of mastery and of standing on one’s own feet.”
Edmund Phelps, Mass Flourishing
I think we’ve all experienced or seen the results of those jobs where the same monotonous drudgery goes on, unchanging, and unchallenging year after year. The job may have started with new challenges and novelty and growth but that was years ago and now the person stuck in it is stagnant and falling into depression. I think anyone in that position intuitively knows they need something new–new problems, new challenges, new innovations, new anything in their life. Some jobs do provide that as an ongoing part of their process while others will be drone work.
There is a level on top of everything I mentioned that I’ve left unspoken: a person must be the agent of their own flourishing. You can not flourish if you are not, as William Ernest would say, master of your fate and captain of your soul. If you do not have the freedom, or are refusing to exercise that freedom (a sign you are lacking courage and are not growing) to take charge of your life and freely choose what challenges to face and how to solve your problems then you are not going to flourish.
I think this is something mental health experts would understand. People need to have a sense of agency in their life–that they have power over their life and well-being–to have good mental health and to have the ability to overcome the challenges they face that are holding back good mental health. Feeling like you are mastering skills, roles, and your own life provides a strong feeling of agency.
This begs the question of whether the population of any nation besides a liberal democracy can flourish. Edmund Phelps discusses the need for freedom and liberality for masses of people to flourish in life and comes to the conclusion that this was one of the necessary ingredients for the industrial revolution to begin in the two most liberal nations of the 19th century: Britain and America.
So who is a person that is flourishing? My own understanding is this: it is someone who is being their best self–someone who loves themselves and others, is freely choosing to grow and overcome challenges in their life and in the world through courage, engagement, and mastery, is creating value for their families and communities, and feels what they’re doing in life is worthwhile.
nice positive encouragement for those of us trying to fix something - against formidable odds.