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
Welcoming Wisdom #2 - Flourishing Is The Foundation
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What does it really mean to flourish as we age? In this second episode of Flourish As You Age, host Michael C. Patterson draws from his forthcoming book, Welcoming Wisdom: How Mature Minds Can Shape a Kinder, Wiser Future, to explore timeless and evolving ideas about the good life—from Aristotle and the Stoics to Buddhist teachings and modern psychology.
This episode invites listeners to clarify what flourishing means to them—beyond comfort or achievement—and to consider how purpose, connection, and resilience shape a life worth living.
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FLOURISHING IS THE FOUNDATION
Welcome to Flourish As You Age, a podcast about living wisely, aging boldly, and shaping a more compassionate future. I’m your host, Michael C. Patterson.
This series features readings and reflections from my upcoming book, Welcoming Wisdom: How Mature Minds Can Shape a Kinder, Wiser Future. The book is both a call to action and a guide for those of us entering life’s later chapters—not just to age well, but to grow into the deeper roles that age makes possible: as mentors, creators, and culture shapers.
Over the course of the podcast, we’ll explore seven core mental frameworks—what I call the A–G system of mind management. It’s a simple mnemonic I developed during my own meditations to remind myself of the key mental capacities that underlie wisdom and well-being across a long life.
But before we dive into those seven frameworks, the book opens with a set of foundational chapters that introduce the big ideas—starting with the most essential: flourishing. If we want to flourish as we age, we need to ask what that really means. To us. Personally and culturally.
This episode is titled Flourishing is the Foundation. Let’s begin.
Flourishing is the Foundation
As many of you know, I’ve spent over two decades exploring how to help people live long lives worth living. First through AARP’s Staying Sharp initiative, then through my own company, MINDRAMP, I focused on the behavioral roots of brain health—how to sustain the structure and function of our aging brains.
But over time, I came to realize that brain health, while essential, is not enough. We also need to know what to do with our healthy brains—how to manage our minds, cultivate meaning, and shape a life worth living. That deeper inquiry led to Welcoming Wisdom.
Reclaiming the Good Life
Across cultures and centuries, the quest for a good life has been central to human thought. It’s been called many things—eudaimonia, liberation, happiness, well-being—but at its heart is the aspiration to thrive rather than merely survive. Some definitions emphasize positive emotion; others highlight virtue, meaning, or resilience. But increasingly, scholars and moral thinkers are recognizing that true flourishing is deeply relational and ecological.
Psychologist Sonja Lyubomirsky defines happiness as “the experience of joy, contentment, or positive well-being, combined with a sense that one’s life is good, meaningful, and worthwhile.” In this definition, happiness is not a fleeting high—it’s an integrated way of being. To flourish is to feel good because your life matters—because your life contributes, connects, and expands rather than contracts.
Psychologist Darcia Narvaez, takes this a bit further. She argues that flourishing isn’t just a matter of personal fulfillment—it arises from mutualism: reciprocal, respectful relationships among people, communities, and ecosystems. Her work adds a powerful ecological and developmental dimension to the idea of flourishing. We’ll explore her ideas more fully in a future episode, as we examine how flourishing can be expanded beyond the self, into the wider web of life.
This deeper truth is central to the book: To my mind, flourishing isn’t about maximizing comfort or chasing perpetual bliss. It involves cultivating both meaning and joy, purpose and positivity, and holding them together in dynamic tension. Flourishing includes exuberant pleasure and quiet contentment; it encompasses inner peace and outer contribution.
To flourish is to feel that your life matters—that it contributes, connects, and expands rather than contracts.
Today, however, the idea of the good life has grown thin. Philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah argues that we’ve traded a rich, communal understanding of happiness for a shallow, privatized one. What once involved virtue, justice, and the common good has become a matter of mood optimization, consumer satisfaction, and personal achievement.
Flourishing is not accidental. It’s a practice—a set of learnable, intentional habits that nurture joy, resilience, and connection. And as we age, it becomes not only possible, but essential.
A Meaningful Life
Many early visions of the good life emphasized meaning over happiness. In a world where suffering was often unavoidable, flourishing was seen not as pleasure, but as virtue, wisdom, and service.
Aristotle called this eudaimonia—living in alignment with our highest human nature: to reason well, choose wisely, and serve the common good. For him, personal excellence had to be expressed in civic engagement. The good life was a life of character and contribution.
The Stoics echoed this, insisting that flourishing meant living in harmony with nature—not passively, but through courage, justice, and inner mastery. They anticipated modern ideas of resilience: we can’t control what happens to us, but we can control how we respond—with equanimity and grace.
Buddhism, too, offers a vision of flourishing grounded in ethical action, compassion, and mental clarity. Here, flourishing is defined not by accumulation, but by the reduction of suffering—for oneself and for others.
Across these traditions, we find a shared message: flourishing comes from within, but it is always in service of something beyond the self.
Of course, these ideals often outpaced the social realities of their time. The flourishing life, as originally imagined, was accessible only to a privileged few—free men in ancient Greece, monastics in early Buddhism. It would take centuries of struggle to begin extending the promise of flourishing to everyone.
A Happy Life
The idea of a happy life—what philosophers call hedonia—has always stood in tension with the search for meaning. But the best ancient philosophies of happiness, like Epicureanism, didn’t equate pleasure with excess. Epicurus believed the highest pleasures were tranquility, friendship, and freedom from anxiety.
In that way, his vision of happiness aligns more with Buddhism than with modern consumerism.
Over time, however, happiness became entangled with romantic longing, personal achievement, and material success—until today, it’s often reduced to a marketing promise: happiness as having more, looking better, or being admired.
The modern right to “pursue happiness” was revolutionary—but it, too, was initially limited to the privileged. And even today, the pursuit of happiness often gets confused with the avoidance of difficulty. But real happiness—like flourishing—isn’t about avoiding hardship. It’s about how we meet life with presence, integrity, and care.
As the Stoics remind us, it’s not external events that disturb us—it’s our judgments about them. Flourishing, then, is less about what happens to us, and more about how we respond.
So as you consider what flourishing means to you, ask yourself: What brings meaning? What brings connection? What helps you feel alive and at peace with the world?
In our next episode, we’ll explore how contemporary science—especially positive psychology—understands flourishing as a skill that can be cultivated.
Until then, may you welcome wisdom and find the flow of flourishing.
If you’d like to stay connected, follow the Flourish As You Age podcasts, and subscribe to my Flourish As You Age newsletter for reflections, updates, and exclusive extras from the book-in-progress.