Flourish As You Age
BRAIN HEALTH
MENTAL MANAGEMENT
A GOOD DEATH
Let's not just fade away; let's FLOURISH as we age!
The MINDRAMP Podcasts focus on three key components that have been shown to contribute to flourishing in the later years of your life. You will find mini-series of episodes that explore each component.
1) Keeping your brain and body healthy - see The Roots of Brain Health
2) Managing your mental states - see Flourishing
3) Planning the kind of death you want to have - (coming 10/1/24))
You will also find the occasional episodes that focus social concerns that I feel have an impact on our well-being, for example "Elections."
Flourish As You Age
America's Lousy Report Card on Health & Well-Being
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In this episode I focus on how our socioeconomic ecosystems affect our ability to flourish - or, more to the point, how they makes it harder for us to flourish.
Early this year, 2025, as the Trump administration took power, a group of politically diverse scholars published a Report Card on American Well-Being. On the one hand, the economy is doing great - for the wealthy. But by most other measures the nation is floundering. We are a wealthy nation, but an unhappy nation. By many of the measures of well-being (health and happiness) the United States is doing worse than many other rich nations, and there has been a downward trend in our well-being since the 1990s, when the tracking began.
In 2021, medical anthropologist Daniel R. George and neuroscientist Peter Whitehouse wrote a provocative and insightful book called American Dementia: Brain Health in an Unhealthy Society. They explored the political, economic, social and environmental factors that contribute to cognitive decline, dementia and well-being. In this episode I revisit an interview I did with Danny George and focus on his insightful explanations of our "American Dementia."
Danny George is a professor of Humanities and Public Health Policy at Penn State University and he is acutely aware of America’s malaise.
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