What is thriving?: The Story
New to psychology
The teenagers who scored well
Bhutan, 1972. The fourth king declared Gross National Happiness more important than Gross National Product. 33 indicators. Nine domains. A survey so detailed it took five hours.
Bhutan, 2014. WHO report: highest youth suicide rate in South Asia. Young Bhutanese leaving monasteries for Thimphu’s internet cafes. A specific despair the happiness index had no mechanism to detect — because the survey asked whether your life had meaning, and the teenagers said yes, and then some of them killed themselves anyway.
The instrument measured the answer. It could not measure the distance between the answer and the life.
The scale and the sunset
Martin Seligman built positive psychology on a bet: study what makes people flourish, not what makes them sick. His PERMA model — Positive Emotion, Engagement, Relationships, Meaning, Accomplishment — gave researchers validated scales and governments something to target. Silicon Valley embedded flourishing metrics into dashboards.
A thing experienced was becoming a thing scored.
The quantifiers see the measurement revolution as the best thing that happened to well-being since clean water. The phenomenologists find the project aesthetically precise and existentially bankrupt. They have sat in meditation long enough to know that the richest moments vanish when you hold them still. You cannot weigh a sunset.
The wisdom traditions have been answering the question for millennia without a Likert scale, through practices that produce recognizable transformation. And the pragmatists run public health departments. They need to know whether an intervention worked. Refusing to measure is a luxury available to people who don’t decide which of three underfunded programs gets cut.
The gap
Nobody disputes that some people thrive and some do not. The question is whether defining thriving precisely enough to track it across populations changes the phenomenon. A mother holding her newborn at three in the morning is not experiencing five PERMA dimensions. She is experiencing something that precedes all categories. Bhutan’s teenagers scored well on the survey and badly at the morgue. Whether the gap can be closed by a better instrument or only by abandoning the ambition to instrument it — that is the crux.
Perspectives:
- Quantifiers
- Phenomenologists
- Wisdom traditions
- Pragmatists