Sonja Lyubomirsky welcomes a call for society to encourage people to 'flourish'.
Enjoying our latest content?
Log in or create an account to continue
- Access the most recent journalism from Nature's award-winning team
- Explore the latest features & opinion covering groundbreaking research
or
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Lyubomirsky, S. Psychology: Holding on to happiness. Nature 471, 302–303 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1038/471302a
Published:
Issue date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/471302a
Jean SmilingCoyote
This is all well and good, but I must caution that there are millions of powerful people in the USA and many other countries who do not want other people to "flourish" and will do everything in their power to prevent it, including promulgating the idea that if a person is struggling to "flourish," it's all his own fault. The key is in the mention of "higher earnings" in the next-to-last paragraph of the article. When the powerful prevent others from "flourishing," "the rich get richer, and the poor get poorer." The rich like this. At any moment in time, the economy is a zero-sum game, with a finite amount of income to be distributed – and the rich in many countries are out to get as much as they can. Mega-donations to charity? It's tax-deductible in the USA. These donations do little to help the struggling millions on the bottom position themselves to contribute economically at our most self-actualizing – and often most lucrative – levels. The war of the powerful against as many other people as they can go against is more obvious, at least from the news stories, in the popular uprisings against some dictators in North Africa and the Mideast. Much of the impetus comes from educated but unemployed or underemployed people. The dictators clearly don't want these people to get the opportunity to "flourish," because in the zero-sum political game, it would diminish their power.