#flourishing

#flourishing

Everybody wants to flourish-to experience joyful, meaningful, shared growth. The problem is, we've been trained to approach the most important parts of our lives as if they are games to win, when they're more like gardens to be grown. Flourishing isn't about being smarter-it's about taking simple actions that foster the ecosystem of your life.

In The Mattering Instinct: How Our Deepest Longing Drives Us and Divides Us, Harvard philosopher Rebecca Newberger Goldstein argues that human flourishing rests on two distinct 'cornerstones of our humanness': connectedness and the longing to matter. Connectedness—what we often call belonging—is 'the feeling that there are particular others who are prepared to pay us special attention, whether we deserve it or not.' It is unconditional, relational, and necessary. But it is not sufficient.

The definition of flourishing we have used at the Human Flourishing Program at Harvard is "the relative attainment of a state in which all aspects of a person's life are good, including the contexts in which that person lives." Understood thus, flourishing is an ideal. It is not something we ever attain perfectly in this life. Flourishing is also multi-dimensional. We may be flourishing in certain ways, but not in others.

"It raises important questions with regard to whether we are investing enough in our youth," said Tyler VanderWeele, highlighting a global study's troubling findings on youth well-being.