A Call to Eudaimonia
experimenting our way towards flourishing in the 21st century
We’ve been contemplating what it means to live a good life since the dawn of time, but for many, realizing it was out of reach.
Throughout most of history, humanity was oriented towards survival. As we find our way to a post-scarcity world, we're pioneering a new dimension of our human condition: the pursuit of life in accordance to our will.
We descend from societies where "practically nobody had choices. Until about 1900, even in the most highly developed countries, the overwhelming majority followed their father's line of work — if they were lucky. If your father was a peasant farmer, you were a peasant farmer. If he was a craftsman, you were a craftsman. There was only downward mobility; there was no upward mobility."1
In 2024, we're in the early stages of grappling with the power of choice. With autonomy comes great responsibility. For the first time, we have the power to collectively live more examined lives, retire our outdated scripts, and write new narratives in pursuit of flourishing in this century.
To flourish is to live a life in integrity and in alignment with our truth. Yet, we face structural forces pushing against us — the rise of extractive technology making us more reliant on tech than ever, the prominence of processed foods making us sicker, the increase in societal pressures pushing us to pursue lifestyles that leave us more disconnected.
Yes, we need new systems built from the ground up to serve us, but we can’t sit around waiting for a new reality to materialize. It’s up to us to reimagine how we can live within the reality that exists, take responsibility for our own flourishing, and mobilize towards designing the future we wish to see.
Rather than be bound by the limitations of our systems, what if we rose to meet the ingenuity of our imagination? How do we thrive in the 21st century in the face of everything holding us back from connecting with our human nature? That’s what we’re here to examine.
🗣️ This is a call to experiment and redesign what modern day human flourishing looks like.
When you think of the people who are flourishing in your life, who comes to mind? If you don’t top that list, this project is meant to serve as a compass and beacon of hope, illuminating paths towards a life overflowing with meaning, whatever that means for you.
This essay sets out to:
Map the 5 pillars of well-being as defined by positive psychology and use it as a compass as we navigate towards modern flourishing,
Shine a light on the (invisible) forces we’re up against in our attempts to move beyond surviving to thriving, and
Kick off a series of n = 1 and community experiments using our lives as petri dishes in pursuit of advancing our collective well-being
My intention is to draw wisdom from perspectives across time and geography on what it means to flourish, starting with the modern western interpretation: positive psychology. It’s the field of psychology dedicated to the science of human flourishing, founded by Dr. Martin Seligman, the former President of the American Psychological Association, in the 90s.
My vision for this project is to integrate:
Researching, writing, and featuring case studies of what’s possible
Examples: Nervous System Mastery, Live Near friends, The Commons (SF), Fractal Collective (NYC)
Designing and running community experiments to pressure test our limits
Examples: AI & inner work, tech sabbaths
I'd love to have you along for the journey as I spotlight and experiment with redefining the ways we live, work, and play.
a walk down flourishing lane
The notion of human flourishing is derived from eudaimonia, first coined by Aristotle in his Nicomachean Ethics. Eudaimonia transcends the fleeting sense of happiness and is rooted in embodying the highest human good.
It’s about living a life where we feel whole, generative, and resilient — buoyed by our ability to cultivate days defined by positive emotions, engaging experiences, nourishing relationships, meaningful work, and accomplishing what we set out to do.
Many of the conversations about flourishing are happening in academia, backed by projects like Humanities and Human Flourishing and rigorous research like the Global Flourishing Study. While incredibly impactful for informing policies and programs at the national level, the most meaningful change begins at the individual level and starts with self-knowledge. How do we begin to draw inspiration from academia?
Inspired by the Quantified Self movement, a community that advocates for taking our health into our own hands through self-tracking and self-experimentation, I want to poke at the possibility of actualizing collective flourishing by first examining and revitalizing the way we live our own lives.
Flourishing looks different for each of us because it’s about coming home to ourselves. The journey back to ourselves can be painful, catalyzing existential crises. We’re letting go of the ways we’ve been conditioned to live in exchange for reconnecting with what’s always been true for us, underneath all of the societal shoulds. Without existential dread, we wouldn’t have the fire within us to alter the course of our lives. The underlying angst is wisdom from our body, reminding us that it’s time for change — the desires that live dormant within us are vying for something greater.
On the course towards flourishing is floundering. The first step of bringing awareness to what feels off course allows us to begin to shed the parts of life we’re living that aren’t meant for us.
a detour from the promised land
By nearly all accounts, life in developed nations has meaningfully improved over the last 50 years.
Within the US:
We’re more educated: with college degrees on the rise and graduates making up 38% of the population, up 5x from 60 years ago (~7.7%)
We have access to more jobs: with the unemployment rate at 2.9%, the lowest it’s been since the 1950s
We’re living longer: with average life expectancy at 79 years old, up 9 years from 70 years old in the 1960s
By these standards, it feels like we've reached a promised land that our parents and grandparents could've only dreamed of. And yet.
As our government touts an era of strong economic growth, we’re left wondering why college graduates are swimming in student loan debt (at an average of $37,000 for federal loans), why it takes millennials far longer to purchase a home than prior generations, and why 60% of adults live paycheck to paycheck.
It feels more like we’re treading water, trying to stay afloat, than riding the wave.
We may have more opportunities than ever before, but seizing those opportunities hasn’t brought us nearly the amount of freedom and wealth we expected to ascend towards our “American Dream.” Our experiences are falling short of our expectations.
While we’ve raised the baseline for our material worlds, our inner worlds are more dysregulated than ever.
The prevalence of depression among young people is shockingly high worldwide. By some estimates, depression is about ten times more common now than it was fifty years ago…Depression now ravages teenagers: fifty years ago, the average age of first onset was about thirty. Now the first onset is below age fifteen.
— Martin Seligman, Flourish
It’s no wonder we’ve developed learned helplessness, adopting the belief that nothing we do matters and inheriting default ways of living.
We’re at a pivotal moment when we’ve begun destigmatizing the aspects of our lives that need examining rather than repressing: our mental health, our ambition, our relationships, our sources of meaning.
It’s only at the brink of realizing how we’re living is not okay that we’re waking up to the reality that the systems that power our lives were designed to help us survive, not thrive. Our “norms” are ripe for change.
Building a better future begins with us questioning our default assumptions and empowering ourselves to rethink the way things are done. Capitalism values a culture of wealth accumulation and overconsumption. It’s time to reconsider what we value and derive meaning from.
5 pillars of human flourishing
If we want to flourish and if we want to have well-being, we must indeed minimize our misery; but in addition, we must have positive emotion, meaning, accomplishment, and positive relationships. The skills and exercises that build these are entirely different from the skills that minimize our suffering.
— Martin Seligman, Flourish
There are 5 main measures to well-being in positive psychology:
I’ll outline how each of these elements contribute to well-being in modern day. In future essays of this series, we’ll examine case studies and run experiments in pursuit of improving our relationship with each pillar.
The good news is that these five elements fuel one another. The momentum of one is the catalyst for another. In an analysis by Dr.
, a cognitive scientist researching human potential, he found that all five factors are very strongly correlated. People who score higher on one of the measures tended to score higher across the other elements and vice versa.positive emotions
Since the dawn of modern psychology, the focus has been on curing the pathologies of anxiety and depression, attempting to move us from -1 to 0. While this work is absolutely critical, we spent little time considering what happens when we reach 0. It's not enough to simply pursue arriving at baseline — what about moving from -1 to 1? That path is going to look entirely different. Reducing suffering is just the first step of raising the bar for our existence.
Positive emotions begin with taking care of our minds and bodies to fuel our souls. It’s our responsibility to set the conditions and give ourselves a fighting chance to reap the benefits of pursuing engaging and meaningful activities, cultivating nourishing relationships, and achieving our ambitions — all which contribute to emotional well-being.
It starts with nurturing our psychological, physical, and metabolic health.
psychological health
Psychological well-being stems from our ability to hold space for ourselves as we ride the roller coaster of life, up and down. It’s about cultivating self-reliance and owning that, in most cases, it’s up to us to manage our mental health then seek others’ support and care.
Relationships serve as a compliment to our own work. We must first see ourselves clearly before relying on others to see us clearly. This may look like committing to a meditation or breathwork practice, working with a somatic therapist or coach, developing an expressive journaling practice, getting in touch with our nervous system, learning to navigate big emotions with an AI guide (more on nervous system work and AI guides in upcoming essays).
Solidifying our sense of self and trusting our wisdom is the first step towards flourishing — dancing with our shadows, seeking insight from our triggers, and distancing ourselves from societal shoulds. Once we’ve introspected in solitude, we have the capacity to integrate and heal in community with others.
physical health
As our society transitioned from factory workers to knowledge workers, we’ve devolved into mass disembodiment. We went from being on our feet to sitting on our butts all day. We’ve traded our humanity for professionalism, tying our identities to our productivity levels and dissociating from our bodies, surprised when we’re confronted by migraines and chronic stress.
When we sit for long stretches of time, we become detached from our body, holding our breath while getting to inbox zero (email apnea), intensely staring at our screens (computer vision syndrome), and straining our neck for hours on end (tech neck).
A common antidote is scheduling daily intense workouts to combat our sedentary lifestyles. While getting our heart rate up and moving our body once a day is better than no movement at all, research studies out of Columbia University Medical Center's Exercise Testing Lab found that “walking snacks” — getting up from your desk for a 5-minute walk every 25 minutes — led to:
Glucose levels trending lower (decrease by 60% from sitting all day)
Reduced blood pressure (by 5 points)
Better concentration (maintaining mood when work started at 9am and finished at 5pm), less depressive symptoms, and less fatigue
When we consistently reconnect with our bodies and move through stale energy, we’re reminded of the wisdom that our body has to offer.
Our current bandaid solution to caring for ourselves is driven by the narratives of hustle culture. It’s led us to believe that the dysregulation we feel internally and physically when we prioritize our work and the material world over our inner world is normal and can be solved by “self-care.” This isn’t about self-care. It’s about getting to a baseline for our psychological and physical well-being to live in harmony with our body and mind rather than constantly seeking solutions to resolve tension.
In her essay, The way we live in the United States is not normal,
points out:Eventually, all your "hustle and grinding" leads you to the land of "self-care."
Self-care is late-stage capitalism’s solution to the problem it created. How convenient that after turning your neck into a tangle of knots or creating pathological levels of anxiety and exhaustion, the "solution" is for you to spend money you don't have so you can just feel normal.
metabolic health
An equally important, often invisible, force at play is the food we fuel our bodies with. The food we consume each day literally influences how our genes express themselves, powering our mind and body. Our food becomes our mood.
Compared to 100 years ago, we’re consuming 10x more sugar per day. No wonder why only 12% of Americans are metabolically healthy. Mounting evidence shows that diets that reduce inflammation and support stable glucose levels are associated with lower rates of depression. These diets are made up of micronutrients, fiber, omega-3s, probiotics, and little or no added sugars — in other words, none of the processed options prevalent in our grocery stores today.
And yet, major food producers continue to try and convince us how their packaged foods are “natural,” “low-fat, “sugar-free,” and “organic.”
Many spiritual traditions suggest that attachment is the root cause of all suffering. Bliss is the absence of attachment.
Cravings are the ultimate form of attachment. An insatiable wanting for more.
Our ultra-processed food that has been systematically normalized and subsidized in America is biochemically engineered to generate maximal craving. "Craveability" is literally a term used in marketing from companies like Kelloggs. They aren't even hiding their desire to entrench our attachment to their products.
Our food systems were designed to scale and maximize profit, training our brains to reach for “comfort” foods, all the while making us sicker.
If you’re interested in going down the rabbit hole of why metabolic health is so critical to our well-being, I highly recommend:
Levels’ The ultimate guide to metabolic health as a primer
If you’re interested in diving deeper, check out:
Dr. Casey Means’ book, Good Energy
Dr. Christopher Palmer’s book, Brain Energy
engagement
How many activities in your life induce a state of flow and focus?
While the reality is that not everything we do will nudge us towards flow, maximizing for flow is a good barometer for how we ought to curate our calendars.
Think about the big pillars in your life: health, work, and relationships. How engaged do you feel in each area of your life?
Assuming a 40-hour work week and 8 hours of sleep per night, we spend 36% of our week working which is why we often give so much weight to seeking fulfillment in our jobs. If you’ve been feeling out of flow for some time, it's worth asking yourself whether it's time for a change. A change in job or diversifying your sources of meaning away from work.
While it’s ideal to find periods of flow in your day job, how can you make it a priority through other outlets if you’d prefer not to move on from your 9-5? Think about the aspects of self-expression that you aren’t able to tap into during work hours. Creative pursuits? Community building? Volunteer projects?
Viewing our expression as a vehicle for self-discovery gives us the freedom to take messy action and begin somewhere, anywhere. The more experiments we run, the more we learn about ourselves, the more creative we can get about doing things that drop us into flow.
Being in service of others allows us to zoom out of our own challenges and tune into the lives of those around us, reminding us that we’re all just doing the best we can as we each scale our own mountains
Movement is often a big contributor to flow because it’s the act of getting out of our minds and into our bodies. Being embodied expands our perspective and reminds us of what our bodies were born to do: be in motion
Being engaged with our lives is ultimately the result of building and living a life that is congruent with our values — and gives us the capacity to engage in the world around us, socially, civically, environmentally.
positive relationships
Beyond one-on-one positive relationships, it’s about cultivating a nourishing community. Having deep individual friendships is the prerequisite to building a meaningful community — what allows us to feel like we belong to something greater than ourselves is to be in connection with others.
Community happens in the overflow. By taking care of ourselves first, we then have the capacity to show up more compassionately for others and clearly see them for who they are rather than who we want them to be.
kindred friends
How do we find and build friendships that nourish our soul? It starts with a willingness to meet ourself at the deepest levels by doing the work and getting to know who we are.
In her essay, Show Up For Yourself First,
highlights:Not knowing your needs makes it hard to cultivate relationships where others will be able to understand and fulfill those needs. And if you haven’t done the work of learning how to like yourself, it makes it a lot harder to cultivate the skills necessary to show up for others.
In the work, you’ll come face to face with your ego — a part that’s protected you from advocating for your true needs, having the hard conversations, and bringing relationships to the next level for fear of disappointment or conflict. Part of this process is being open to heartbreak as a possibility — not everyone is ready to venture as deep as you desire. As you walk the path of turning inward, you’ll realize that it all begins with your relationship with you.
We know at an intellectual level that we’re living through a loneliness crisis, but what does it mean to feel lonely and what can we do about it? It’s about getting honest about what you’re seeking from your friendships, having conversations to understand what your friends are searching for, and co-creating the experiences that allow each person to feel fully seen.
Then, it’s about reimagining the way we structure our lives — from building community on the fringes to centering our lives around them.
There are projects like:
Live Near Friends taking off designed to help us close the distance between us and the people we care about most
- that feature friends who are making these dreams a reality
a family affair
If you think you are enlightened, go and spend a week with your family.
— Ram Dass
For most of us, we’re particularly susceptible to falling into old patterns and reverting back to old versions of ourselves when we’re with our families. The old dynamics that we grew up with are still alive and well in our bodies. It takes courage and faith to believe that we have the authority to learn from triggering interactions and use them as a way to understand what’s unresolved in old dynamics.
Owning that we have the agency to break old patterns and set new boundaries begins with cultivating a strong sense of self. Where do my needs and desires end and where do the other person’s begin?
Getting clear on what you’ll no longer stand for in a loving way will inevitably cause discord — when a familiar dynamic is being threatened, it’s natural for things to get “worse” before they get better. Old patterns take two to sustain. It takes time and the will to hold firm to updated boundaries in order to make space for new, healthier dynamics to take shape.
meaning
Meaning is found at the intersection of belonging to something beyond ourselves and contributing to the well-being of those around us. Traditionally, we found meaning through engaging in our local places of worship, town squares, and club meetings.
But with the decline of our mental health and our faith in traditional institutions in conjunction with the rise of consumerism and companies competing for our mind share, we’ve slipped into a meaning crisis.
There's an increasing sense…of losing touch with reality. We encounter more and more often, in individuals and groups, nihilism, expressions of cynicism. Expressions of deep kinds of frustration and futility.
You have the abandonment of trust in many of our public institutions. We've completely lost any sort of faith or trust in our political system. We're losing faith in our judicial system. Religious affiliation is declining consistently throughout. People's participation in clubs. Organization is in decline in general.
— John Vervaeke, Introduction to the Meaning Crisis
How can we feel a part of something greater than ourselves if we don’t even feel connected to ourselves? We must first be in service of ourselves to be in service of others.
Finding our way back to meaning is about putting down the very things we grasp tightly at — our addictive technologies, our processed foods, our unhealthy relationships, our ego-fueled aspirations.
When we become aware of what is no longer serving us, we can create space for new ways of living: getting lost in nature over our newsfeed, seeking out wholesome conversations over perpetuating old patterns, venturing into uncharted territory to seek inspiration rather than returning to the same well-worn paths.
achievement
In modern society, we’ve conformed around achievement to mean that we’ve made it — arrived at a level of wealth, status, and accumulation where we can live comfortably and no longer worry about insert-all-the-things-we-worry-about.
We’ve resigned to the idea that the journey getting there may be brutal, but hopefully it’ll all be worth it. But, what if we never “make it”? What if the slog doesn’t amount to all that we’ve dreamed of?
Life rarely unfolds exactly as we want it to. And if we stop and think about it, that makes perfect sense. The scope of life is universal, and the fact that we are not actually in control of life’s events should be self-evident. The universe has been around for 13.8 billion years, and the processes that determine the flow of life around us did not begin when we were born, nor will they end when we die…
No wonder there’s so much tension, anxiety, and fear. Each of us actually believes that things should be the way we want them, instead of being the natural result of all the forces of creation.
— Michael Singer, The Surrender Experiment
What if instead, we focused on getting clear about the change we want to see in the world and contributing our talents to making it a reality?
Achievement calls for a mix of a clear vision, agency, hard work, and a large heaping of surrendering to the forces that are out of our control.
If we’re going to work hard, we may as well work purposefully and in alignment with our values.
Our traditional standards of impact and the way we fuel our ambition is outdated. Just as we've used fossil fuels historically to fuel our lives, many of us have allowed our ego to fuel our ambition.
When we’re motivated by deep insecurity, we strive towards collecting accomplishments that are deemed impressive by others, but rarely does that lead us towards a life that we would have otherwise chosen for ourself. The sentiment of “I can do more, I can be more” is buoyed by the notion that you should do more regardless of what you want to do. No amount of success will quench our desire to be enough. We keep the hedonic treadmill running, fueled by a bottomless pit of proving ourself to others.
What does aligning your ego with your will and your soul look like?
Rather than giving into the insecurity that you must be good at what you do and make copious amounts of money while doing it, what would it mean to bet on yourself and take a shot at experimenting with the thing that’s always called to you?
Will your achievements matter in the end if you didn’t care much about the work along the way?
Perhaps reaching some level of success on your current path will enable you to fund yourself in moving towards doing the thing you actually desire — if that’s the case, don’t get stuck playing the game for too long. Get clear about what winning that game looks like so that you can start the game you actually want to play.
raising the bar for our existence
There you have it – these are the 5 pillars that define a life well-lived brought to us by positive psychology.
With this project, I hope to raise the bar for what we accept as the defaults we’ve conceded to living by and infuse a sense of possibility in building a future where we can all flourish.
It’s about getting back to the basics and returning to our truth.
In the coming weeks and months, I’ll spotlight people and projects paving paths towards flourishing. I’ll run community experiments and invite you to join me in running your own experiments.
Let’s start a movement and take flourishing into our own hands.
If you’re based in the Bay Area, I’m hosting a Flourishathon 🌿 on Friday, 3/8, at 4:30PM (PT) to design community flourishing experiments together. Join us!
If you’re designing your own life around flourishing or curious about running experiments, I’d love to hear from you! What does flourishing mean to you? What experiments are you interested in running? Which one of the five elements of well-being are you most curious about?
Let me know in the comments or say hi on Twitter :)
Thanks to Ryan, , and Sam Wolf for reviewing drafts of this essay and pushing my thinking on flourishing in the 21st century.
Peter Drucker, Managing Knowledge Means Managing Oneself.
Great read, Cissy! This has been especially helpful after undergoing a major health operation.
Great read and call to action! I documented my latest "experiment" here: https://mindfulnerd.substack.com/p/i-meditated-with-12-strangers-online (I Meditated with 12 Strangers Online Daily for 400 Days)