Thriving Lives

We developed Family by Family to enable more Austrlian families to thrive

Today, the core challenge for most of us living in the West isn’t how long we live, but how we live - how we age, how we work, how we connect to others. We don’t just want to get by - to be insured from risk or protected from social circumstance - we want to be able to thrive. We want to have fulfilling relationships, to find and use our talents, to feel good and in-control, to have a purpose, to enjoy how we spend our time, and probably most of all, to know we matter as people and not just as widget-makers and consumers. Even the statistics show widget-making and consumption doesn’t equate to life satisfaction.

“Gross domestic product measures the volume of goods and services that are produced and consumed, and any events that increase that volume increase the GDP. It does not matter if those events happen to decrease the quality of life…The more people who scarf down antidepressants, the more the GDP goes up...Life satisfaction in the US has been flat for fifty years even through GDP has tripled”

Martin Seligman. Flourish. 2011, p233

Of course not everyone in the West has experienced the gains from the last century. 22% of households in the UK are designated low income, 15% of people in the USA live below the poverty line, life expectancy amongst Indigenous Australians is at pre-industrial era numbers. Our moral responsibility is not just to bring everyone up to minimum standards, but to recognise that the pursuit of minimum standards can inadvertently pervert our behaviours and prevent us from thriving. 

If we truly want more people to thrive, existing welfare systems and services won’t do. We need different kinds of social solutions - principles, platforms, organisations, and programs - designed with us, to develop our capabilities, aspirations, relationships, and achievements. In practice, we need social solutions that can shift our behaviours towards where want to go, not just to where systems and services want us to go.

This requires social solutions that can broaden our preferences and motivations, teach us new skills, provide us with feedback, cultivate support networks, help us feel competent & in-control, and remove barriers to change.

Our working definition of thriving

Thriving Lives are lives where we actively develop our aspirations, capabilities, relationships and achievements. Lives where we feel good and in-control.

 

Adapted from Co-designing Thriving Solutions: A prototype curriculum for social problem solving.