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 #3 - Flourishing with Virtue
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What does it mean to live a virtuous life—and how does virtue relate to human flourishing? In this episode, we explore the moral dimensions of flourishing through both Western and developmental lenses. Drawing on classical ideas from ancient philosophy, we ask whether virtue is grounded in reason, emotion, or something deeper.
We focsu on the work of psychologist Darcia Narvaez, whose research suggests that our capacity for virtue is rooted in the benevolent care and emotional attunement we receive in early childhood. From Aristotle to affective neuroscience, this conversation invites you to reconsider how virtue emerges, why it matters, and how it shapes our ability to flourish in a complex world.
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FLOURISH WITH VIRTUE
Excerpted from the the new book I'm writing, Welcoming Wisdom: How Mature Minds Can Shape a Kinder, Wiser Future (wt).
Introduction
Welcome to Flourish As You Age, a podcast about living wisely, aging boldly, and shaping a more compassionate future. I’m your host, Michael Patterson.
This new 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.
Welcoming Wisdom blends science, story, and contemplative insight into a practical philosophy of aging—one that sees maturity not as decline, but as evolution. Over the course of the podcast, we’ll explore four foundational ideas and then seven core mental frameworks that I feel undergird the wisdom systems about flourishing that make the most sense to me.
We have started by examining the topic of flourishing. If we want to flourish as we age, we ought to know what we mean by flourishing. How will we know when we are flourishing.
In today’s episode, we’ll focus on The Role of Virtue in Flourishing. Let’s begin.
Virtue and the Practice of Flourishing
Flourishing seems to require more than pleasure or success—it calls for a sense that we are living well and acting wisely. Most of us need to believe that we are behaving virtuously in order to feel whole. Yet definitions of virtue are dynamic, often contradictory, and shaped by history, culture, and circumstance. What one tradition sees as moral integrity, another may view as misplaced obedience.
Still, there are patterns. Virtue is often described as a practice rather than a possession—it is best expressed through actions rather than words. It typically involves regulating our impulses, aligning our behavior with values, and contributing to the well-being of others.
In this episode, I follow the work of psychologist Darcia Narvaez, who invites us to move beyond rigid or individualistic moral codes and instead cultivate what she calls "engaged ethics"—a relational approach to virtue rooted in empathy, cooperation, and ecological attunement.
For Narvaez, ethical behavior is not limited to how we treat one another; it also encompasses how we relate to the more-than-human world. This model echoes older, often Indigenous frameworks in which moral behavior is not defined by abstract rules, but by lived relationships—benevolent cooperation with people, place, and planet.
Narvaez contrasts this relational orientation with a dominant Western mindset shaped by individualism, competition, and a belief in human separateness from—and superiority over—nature.
In Western systems, virtue often centers on protecting individual rights, ensuring fairness through competition, and enforcing moral rules from a detached or abstract perspective. It frequently carries an undercurrent of moral purification—rooted in religious or cultural narratives that view human nature as flawed, requiring discipline, restraint, or redemption. This model may support certain legal and civic ideals, but it often neglects relational wisdom—such as knowing when to listen rather than speak, when to offer care rather than critique, or how to restore harmony after rupture—and it tends to overlook our ecological interdependence with the more-than-human world.
In Narvaez’s view, virtue is not about conforming to fixed rules or cleansing oneself of unwholesome desires, but about deepening attunement to our interdependent relationships—with other people, other species, and the ecosystems that sustain life. Virtue, in this sense, is not a static set of principles to memorize or obey—it is a dynamic, lived process. It is cultivated through ongoing engagement: through connection, responsiveness, reciprocity, and mutual care.
While some discussions of virtue pit reason against emotion, Narvaez points to the possibility of integration. Rational reflection helps clarify our values, but it is intuition—rooted in relationship and embodied experience—that often guides virtuous action. In this view, virtue is not a conceptual cloak we consciously wear or discard; it is an intuitive responsiveness that emerges through connection. But this moral intuition emerges naturally only when the conditions for its development are in place—conditions of care, trust, safety, and attunement. Cultivated over time, true virtue becomes an instinctive expression of benevolence and care—a natural response to our interactions with fellow beings and the world we inhabit.
Using Narvaez’s perspective as a guide, I find it useful to distill virtue into two enduring moral commitments:
1. The Golden Rule reminds us to treat others as we wish to be treated—an ethic of empathy and reciprocity.
2. The Greater Good encourages us to consider how our actions contribute to collective well-being.
Together, they form a simple but profound compass for navigating what it means to live and act virtuously in a complex world.
While these two commitments—the Golden Rule and the Greater Good—are simple and widely accepted, they are not universally embraced. To reject the Greater Good, for instance, is to claim that the well-being of some people matters more than that of others. This position underpins elitist, autocratic, or supremacist ideologies—those that justify domination by appealing to inherent superiority.
Flourishing in Connection with Earth and Each Other
To better understand how this relational model of virtue develops, Narvaez draws on evolutionary neuroscience, Indigenous worldviews, and developmental psychology. She argues that our capacity to flourish is rooted in what she calls the “Evolved Nest”—a set of nurturing conditions that sustained human well-being for most of our history. These include extended kin networks, responsive caregiving, free play, and immersion in nature. When these conditions are present, children develop a natural orientation toward empathy, cooperation, and ecological attunement.
Modern society, she warns, has deviated from this path. The dominant culture prizes individualism, competition, and control over nature. It celebrates left-hemisphere analytical thinking at the expense of right-hemisphere relational awareness. The result is not only widespread anxiety and alienation, but a moral disorientation that undermines collective flourishing.
Narvaez’s moral model draws inspiration from small-band hunter-gatherer societies and Indigenous communities, many of which exhibited remarkable empathy, cooperation, and earth-connectedness. Yet how these values scale to modern societies—marked by mass populations, cultural pluralism, and systemic inequities—remains an open challenge.
To counter this drift towards individualism, Narvaez calls for a renaissance of relational wisdom—one that does more than simply resurrect Indigenous or pre-Axial cosmologies. Pre-Axial societies excelled at embedding virtue in kinship, ritual, and reciprocity with land, yet their explanations were framed in mythic narratives that many modern minds find difficult to credit literally.
The first Axial Age carried ethics inward, turning virtue into an interior moral struggle and extending compassion beyond the tribe, but it often lost sight of ecological reciprocity. While Narvaez herself does not frame her work in terms of Axial history, her call to regenerate relational and ecological wisdom aligns with what some—including myself—see as the groundwork for a Second Axial Age. Such an age would braid together the relational attunement of ancestral lifeways with the conscience-driven universality of Axial thought, all refined through the lens of contemporary science. Only such a synthesis can meet the moral demands of a planet-wide, interdependent civilization.
In this light, the pursuit of flourishing becomes an act of cultural evolution. It calls for a reorientation of our priorities: from extraction to regeneration, from separation to communion, from dominance to stewardship. The call for a Second Axial Age envisions an era that reintegrates the intuitive, earth-based wisdom of ancient traditions with the ethical insight and cognitive breakthroughs of the first Axial shift—while also drawing on the expanding knowledge of contemporary science.
Narvaez’s work broadens the meaning of flourishing—expanding it beyond the optimization of mental health or the pursuit of personal goals. To flourish, she suggests, is to remember who we are as a species: nested within a web of life, designed for interdependence, and capable of co-creating a world in which all beings can thrive.
Narvaez reminds us that flourishing requires more than emotional insight or ecological awareness—it depends on equitable access to the conditions that support moral development. Capacities like empathy, fairness, and conscience do not arise in isolation; they emerge when people grow up in environments of safety, trust, and sufficiency.
These conditions arise in what Robin Wall Kimmerer calls the gift economy—a cultural orientation grounded not in transaction but in reciprocity and mutual care. Narvaez echoes this in her call to value mutualism over market logic. Both thinkers challenge the modern belief that well-being is tied to accumulation, stimulation, and constant growth. Cultures of “enoughness”—which honor generosity over hoarding and sufficiency over scarcity—foster the emotional security, social trust, and moral clarity that true flourishing requires. They invite us to reimagine wealth not as what we own, but as how we belong.
All right! Those are some of my thoughts on the role virtue plays in flourishing. In the next episode we will look at the role of awe and wonder and the sense of the sacred and how they contribute to flourishing. Until then: here's hoping you welcome wisdom and find the flow of flourishing.
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