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.