“Languishing” is the in-vogue term for today’s widely shared sense of pandemic malaise. According to some psychologists, you can stop languishing with simple steps: Savor the small stuff. Do five good deeds. Find activities that let you “flow.” Change how you think and what you do, and today’s languishing can become tomorrow’s flourishing.
But in an unjust world burdened by concurrent threats – war, a pandemic, the slow burn of climate change – does this argument ring true? Can simple activities like these really help us – all of us – flourish?
As social scientists who study flourishing and health, we have watched this psychological approach capture attention – and massive investment. Most of this work is rooted in positive psychology, a fast-growing field that sees individuals as largely responsible for their own flourishing. This new research, most of it survey-based, aims to revamp health and social policy, nationally and globally. It may well succeed at this — which has us concerned.
What could be wrong with a worldwide effort to help people flourish? Our concern is that a narrowly psychological approach overestimates individuals’ control over their own well-being, while underestimating the role of systemic inequities, including those that well-designed laws and policies can help address.
Here’s what people told us affected flourishing
As researchers who combine surveys with interviews, we know that thousands of data points can tell us many things – but not the stuff you learn from sitting down with people to talk, and listen.
In a new paper based on our collaborative research, we asked open-ended questions that surveys cannot answer. Not just, “Are you flourishing?,” but also: “Why, or why not? What helps you flourish? What gets in the way?”
We took our questions to public libraries and private boardrooms, coffee shops and kitchen tables throughout Greater Cleveland, Ohio, speaking with 170 people from different backgrounds: men and women, rich and poor, liberal and conservative, Black, white and Latino. Would their answers align, we wondered? Would they mesh with the experts’?
In one area, our interviewees’ perspectives line up with leading survey research: For over 70%, social connections had a powerful impact on whether they felt they were flourishing. But other topics people raised are ignored in most leading studies of flourishing.
For instance, a full 70% mentioned a stable income. Nearly as many flagged what public health professionals call the social determinants of health – reliable access to things like healthy food, transportation, education and a safe place to live. Some also cited discrimination, unequal treatment by the police, and other factors described as structural determinants of health.
Poverty, inequity and racism get in the way
For people who face inequity in their own lives, the links between adversity and flourishing were crystal clear.
Over half of…