From Languishing to Flourishing

 

In this second part of my series on languishing, I focus on some of the remedies that can turn someone who is languishing into someone who is flourishing. 

First of all, I'd like to talk about two possible paths to flourishing :

• The external path is where we keep score and become good at something, like our jobs. We take the external approach when we do something to improve our social status. The external pathway is objectively rewarding, but you get diminishing returns as you age. 
• The internal path is all about meaningful personal change and ethics. As you get older, there are more opportunities to follow it, at least because the nosy relatives who judge you during the New Year family gatherings begin to disappear one by one.

I find the internal path harder to walk than the external one because I can keep score and compare with other people. But I am also aware that post-FIRE, there is now lower-hanging fruit for the internal path.

After that, the steps to flourish all seem like another self-help guide. I wish that future research could dive into more granular detail, but readers can look at the following for now.

• Learn something new - This is too easy thanks to Skills Futures, but my emphasis is to teach something new because the Feynman Techniques shows us that we can reach much higher levels of mastery when we teach something.
• Building Relationships - While the book says that quality matters more than quantity, I wish different personality types could use different strategies. As folks get older, they become better at ending relationships. If only there was more direction on how to do this. 
• Spiritual Practices - Another valuable opportunity, but this world is full of cults and scams. The question for non-religious folks like me is whether we can come up with ideas that go beyond meditation or yoga. 
• Finding Purpose in Life - Philosophy has relatively good answers to address the problem of finding meaning in life. 
• Play—The funniest thing I realised about this section is that play is supposed to allow a person to practice their imagination and break away from an obsession with achievement. But I've been gaming for so many years that I see long-time gamers flouting this rule continuously because competitive games give them that feeling of success that has eluded them in real life. 

I'm incredibly interested in learning new things for folks who read my blog. I'm also okay at building relationships and finding a purpose in life. I suck at Spiritual practices as I lack patience and have attempted meditation and yoga with almost no results in many stages of my life. I've reduced the amount of Play in my life as many gamers find inauthentic means of Flow and building fake achievements. 

Of course, the whole point of this self-audit is to open my mind again to previous failed attempts and try to do better, but with a different approach.

Finally, you can observe how every single point about flourishing does not involve much money at all, but FIRE can be an enabler as it gives folks time to figure out how to flourish.