Hello Reader!​

I've started researching flourishing. A literary magazine has an open call for pieces on flourishing and it got me thinking, what does it actually mean to flourish?

FLOURISHING: A New Series

We know what a flourishing plant looks like. Lush leaves, juicy fruit, perfect conditions. Give it the right soil, the right light, the right amount of water and it does exactly what it's supposed to do. (Something I still can't seem to figure out 😂) But withhold any of those things and it struggles. Withhold enough of them and it dies.

Simple. Measurable. Obvious. (To most of us!)

But what does a flourishing human look like? Because I've met people with everything who felt completely empty inside. And I've met people with almost nothing who were more alive than anyone I've ever known.

So what's actually going on?

That question is what this series is about. Not a how-to. Not a checklist. Just an honest exploration of what it means to truly flourish as a human being, why so many of us aren't doing it even when conditions look good on paper, and what the science actually says about when and how it becomes possible.

Let's start at the beginning.

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Feel

Feeling Empty

The plant model breaks immediately when you apply it to human beings and the first place it breaks is in how flourishing actually feels.

If the plant model were true, the feeling of flourishing would be directly proportional to your conditions. More resources, more safety, more stability equals more aliveness. Less of those things equals less. It would be a clean equation.

But that's not what we actually observe in human beings and I suspect it's not what you've observed in your own life either.

Think about the times you've felt most alive. Most present. Most like yourself. Were those moments reliably the ones where everything was going well? Or were some of them moments of difficulty, of challenge, of being in the middle of something hard and discovering that you could handle it?

And think about the opposite. Think about the times you've felt most hollow, most disconnected, most like you were going through the motions. Were those always the difficult times? Or were some of them perfectly comfortable periods where nothing was wrong and yet something felt deeply missing?

I find this fascinating because it suggests that flourishing for humans isn't primarily a felt response to external conditions. It's something else. Something more interior. Something that can apparently exist in the presence of difficulty and be entirely absent in the presence of ease.

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Change

The Waiting Room

For a long time the dominant framework for human flourishing looked a lot like the plant model with extra steps.

In 1943, Maslow proposed his famous hierarchy of needs and it became one of the most widely taught ideas in psychology:

1. Physiological needs
2. Safety
3. Love and belonging
4. Esteem
5. Self-actualization

The implicit message was sequential. Meet the lower needs and the higher ones become possible. Skip the sequence and you'll be stuck.

It's an elegant model and it makes intuitive sense. Of course you can't think about meaning and purpose if you're starving. Of course belonging matters more than self-expression when you feel unsafe.

But the hierarchy has a problem. It implies a waiting room. It suggests that flourishing is something you earn access to by getting your more basic needs sorted first. And that implication, however unintentional, has had a strange effect on how we think about our own lives.

We postpone flourishing. We treat it as a destination rather than a capacity. We tell ourselves that we'll really start living when the debt is paid off, when the kids are older, when the relationship is more stable, when the career is more secure, when things calm down. We build elaborate waiting rooms for ourselves and then wonder why we never feel like we've quite arrived.

But the counterexamples argue otherwise. The poet who wrote masterpieces in poverty. The prisoner who found meaning in circumstances designed to strip it away. The person who lost everything and described rebuilding as the most alive they'd ever felt. A cancer survivor who talks about that terrible year as the one where everything became clear.

These people weren't flourishing despite their circumstances. They were flourishing in them. Which means the hierarchy can't be the whole story.

Researchers Edward Deci and Richard Ryan found that when they looked at this question across decades of study was something both simpler and more radical than Maslow's ladder. They discovered human beings have three core psychological needs:

1. Autonomy: the sense that you are the author of your own choices
2. Competence: the sense that you are getting better at something that matters
3. Relatedness: the sense of genuine connection with other people

That's it. Those three things. The self-determination theory.

And none of them require ideal conditions. All three are exercisable in almost any circumstance.

You can choose your response to what's happening even when you can't choose what's happening.

You can get better at something even when resources are scarce.

You can connect genuinely with another person in a prison cell, in a hospital room, in the middle of grief, in the middle of a Tuesday that feels like every other Tuesday.

Flourishing, it turns out, was never waiting for you to get your conditions right. It's been available the whole time.

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Build

3 Things Your Already Doing

When I first encountered self-determination theory I had the slightly disorienting experience of recognizing something I'd already built.

Autonomy. Competence. Relatedness.

Choosing how you respond. Getting better at something. Connecting with another person.

Feel. Change. Build.

What FCB is built on, and what the research keeps confirming, is that flourishing is not a reward for good circumstances. It is a practice. It is something you do, something you build, something you develop a relationship with over time. And it is available to you in your actual life, with its actual problems, right now.

Not when things calm down. Not when the conditions improve. Not when you've finally sorted out the lower levels of the hierarchy and earned your place in the self-actualization line.

In this series I want to explore why, what it looks like in practice, what gets in the way, and what the people who figured it out have in common.

Because flourishing isn't a condition you achieve when life finally cooperates. It's a capacity you already have. And I'm going to spend the next several weeks showing you the science that proves it.

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Don't miss part two next week, because we're going to talk about why hard things might actually be exactly what you need. I know. Stay with me.

But first, I'm curious:

What does flourishing mean to you? Not the definition you'd give in a job interview or a therapy session. The real one. The felt sense of it. When have you felt most alive?

I'll even go first! I know I'm flourishing when I'm busy in a good way - making connections with friends and family, in the zone writing

So hit reply and let me know. I'd love to know what makes your heart sing!

Have a lovely day! - Kate

PS

Pen-A-Pal

If you know anyone who would love a handwritten letter in the mail, please check out my daughter's website. It makes a great gift from a grandparent to encourage kiddos to write to their own family!

​Pen-A-Pal is a monthly service that sends handwritten letters including stickers.

​https://pen-a-pal.com/​

When you sign up there is a place to put in topics the recipient is interested in reading about and if you sign up for premium, the letter incudes paper and a stamped envelope to write Bee back or send to friend or family member!

You can also follow along on her journey on Instagram! Thanks for your support!

​https://www.instagram.com/penapalletters​