Elements of a Flourishing Life: Let's Help the Billionaires Not Just Ourselves

“What every human being can say yes to is flourishing.”—Martin Seligman

“What makes life good?”

It may be one of the oldest human questions, and perhaps one of the few we still might answer together.

I think about this today after reading about the super elite folks from academia, finance, technology surrounding Jeffrey Epstein.  People with billions of dollars, anxious, untethered people with no real understanding in practice of what makes a good, healthy, flourishing life. What a waste.

Let’s start an upward spiral which might eventually reach those on top of the money heap by reviewing what really makes a good life. What we can all say yes to.

We all want lives marked by vitality, meaning, loving relationships, and the chance to grow, right? We want our children not simply to survive but to thrive. We want communities where people can become more whole.

The word I use, taken from Dr. Martin Seligman, is flourishing.

Seligman’s research helped shift psychology from focusing only on what breaks us to asking what helps us come alive. Early in his career, Seligman studied depression and helplessness. Later, he began asking a deeper question: what moves life not merely from suffering toward neutral, but from ordinary toward abundant?

He likes to say most of us do not lie awake at night wondering how to go from minus eight to minus five on a -10 to +10 scale of living well. We wonder how to go from plus two to plus six.

That, in many ways, is the question of flourishing. It's also what we do with ourselves when we aren't fighting wars or diseases or malnourishment or poverty.

Seligman’s answer is captured in a simple but surprisingly rich model called PERMA: Positive Emotion, Engagement, Relationships, Meaning, and Accomplishment. Together they form, not a recipe for perfection, but a framework for the good life.

It begins with positive emotion, though interestingly Seligman warns us not to mistake happiness for the whole story. Pleasure alone is too fragile a foundation.

We know about the hedonic treadmill: what delights us today soon becomes ordinary. New possessions lose shine. Achievements normalize. Even pleasures adapt.

There is also the humbling reality that temperament matters. Some part of our baseline emotional tone appears partly inherited. Some people do seem born with sunnier weather.

Yet this is not cause for resignation. Seligman argues positive emotion can be intentionally lifted—perhaps by 10 to 20 percent—through practices like gratitude, savoring, acts of kindness, and seeking moments of awe. We can enlarge our experience of joy.

Still, flourishing cannot rest there.

A life organized around feeling good can become strangely shallow.

Which brings us to engagement.

This is the realm of flow, described by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi as those moments when time seems to disappear because we are wholly absorbed in something worthy and challenging. It's called flow.

A musician in rehearsal. A gardener pruning roses. A teacher alive in the classroom. A grandparent building a birdhouse with a child.

Flow often emerges, Seligman says, when our strengths meet challenge.

One of his most practical interventions grows from this insight. Identify your signature strengths, then redesign ordinary life to use them more.

He tells of a graduate student who disliked waitressing until she discovered social intelligence was one of her strongest gifts. She began seeing each table not as a burden but as an opportunity to brighten someone’s evening. The work changed because she brought more of herself into it.

That small shift captures something profound. Sometimes flourishing is not finding a new life. It is bringing your best strengths into the life you already have. For example, if you ask me to set the table, I will do it, but not enjoy it very much. But if you ask me to set a lovely table or a creative table or a table where people can best enjoy conversation, I'll be all in.

Relationships, of course, sit near the center of Seligman’s vision, as they do in so much flourishing research. Again and again, studies suggest that enduring well-being is deeply relational.

Here he shares two striking findings.

First, researcher Marcial Losada found that flourishing workplaces tend to have far more positive than negative interactions—roughly three to one. Encouragement, appreciation, curiosity, and support create climates where people do better.

In close relationships, the ratio may matter even more. John Gottman found healthy marriages often show about five positive interactions for every negative one.

Five to one.

Correction matters, but it lands differently when held in a field of affirmation.

Then there is one of my favorite ideas in Seligman’s work (he freely admits he stole it from Shelly Gables): active constructive responding.

When someone shares good news, how do we respond?

A distracted “that’s nice” does little. A cynical response can shrink joy.

But leaning in—asking questions, celebrating, helping another relive the moment—that enlarges connection.

It turns out love is strengthened not only by how we carry one another’s pain, but by how we honor one another’s delight.

Meaning forms the fourth strand, and here Seligman offers one of his most memorable lines: the self is poor soil for flourishing.

Poor soil.

A life turned only inward eventually thins.

Meaning grows when we belong to and serve something larger than ourselves—family, faith, justice, beauty, community, creation.

Seligman illustrates this through a simple experiment. Students were asked one week to do something pleasurable and another week to do something generous (this has been replicated many times with the same results).

Pleasure lifted mood briefly.

Service lingered.

One student spent hours tutoring a child in fractions and found the rest of the day felt somehow transformed—calmer, warmer, more spacious. Another discovered, to her surprise, that helping someone made her happier than shopping.

Many of us have stumbled onto that same truth.

The soul often grows through gift. If you want to lift your depression, the single best thing to do, is go out and do something positive for someone else.

The final piece of PERMA is accomplishment—not status or vanity, but mastery, discipline, and growth.

Seligman is especially interested in grit and self-discipline, and the research here is quietly revolutionary. Perseverance may predict academic success even more strongly than intelligence. In some studies, self-discipline appears substantially more important than IQ. Like 50 percent more important!

That should be encouraging to ordinary strivers everywhere.

Flourishing does not belong only to the gifted.

It belongs also to the steadfast.

Sometimes it looks like brilliance.

Sometimes it looks like showing up again tomorrow. Finding hundreds of way not to make a light bulb.

And yet one of the most moving parts of Seligman’s vision may be what he says about suffering.

Because flourishing is not naïve.

It makes room for wounds.

Seligman speaks of post-traumatic growth—the surprising reality that hardship does not always only diminish. Sometimes it deepens. People may emerge from suffering with more gratitude, courage, compassion, even spiritual depth.

Not because pain is good.

But because human beings can grow through what they endure. Even horrible things like rape and torture.

In one study, strengths like gratitude, hope, kindness, bravery, and spiritual grounding were linked with this kind of growth.

Flourishing is not reserved for those with easy lives.

It may belong especially to those who have suffered and become larger-hearted.

Perhaps what I find most compelling about Seligman’s work is that it is not merely private advice. It edges toward a civic vision. That's what I think of a lot these days.

What if flourishing itself became something communities aspired to foster?

What if progress meant not only a lack of poverty, but belonging?

Not only productivity, but meaning?

Not only security, but human thriving?

In a divided age, perhaps this is one of the few shared yeses available to us.

More joy.

More engagement.

Better relationships.

Deeper purpose.

Worthy accomplishment.

Who would not wish those things to grow?

Three seeds we can all plant this month:

Practice savoring. Stretch a good moment a little longer than usual.

Use one signature strength (Strengths/virtues usually belong in one of these six domains according to Seligman and his colleagues: Wisdom, Courage, Humanity, Justice, Temperance, and Transcendence) - more deliberately in an ordinary task.

When someone shares good news, respond actively and constructively. Help their joy expand.

Flourishing, it turns out, is often built in small practices.

Seligman says there IS life above zero available for all of us - different from what those early psychotherapists like Freud offered.

I keep thinking about that phrase. I keep thinking about those empty, vapid lives of billionaires spent so uselessly and aimlessly. Mostly in pursuit of pleasure as they thought of it, in anxious protection of their power and their wealth instead of joyful, engaged, meaningful, self-disciplined lives devoted not just to themselves but to a better world for all.

Life above zero. We can do a lot better than that by investing not only in healthy forms of pleasure, but also engaging our strengths and becoming absorbed in life, making our lives about something bigger than ourselves, and developing grit and courage and hope which allows us to experience those hurts in life and come out stronger, wiser, kinder.

How might we say yes to more flourishing—in ourselves, in our relationships, and in the wider world—and journey together to the good life?