Meaning, purpose, success, contentment. These are the slippery concepts humans have grappled with and struggled to achieve for millennia. In modern life, it can seem particularly challenging to reach these elusive benchmarks of well-being and feel fully self-actualized. We want it all: close relationships with our families, a thriving social life, a stable and lucrative career, to find meaning and purpose in our everyday activities, to look cool online and off.
Lately, we’ve even come up with new terms and parameters with which to measure ourselves. What does it mean, for example, to “flourish”? How do we know when we are “enough”? What does authenticity look like in practice when so many of our daily interactions are now mitigated by screens? In this series on confronting the self, Vox senior correspondent Allie Volpe tackles these hard-to-pin-down subjects to tell you what really matters and what doesn’t, and how to truly reach for a fulfilling life and develop a deeper understanding of yourself when there are so many competing demands and values.
Allie examines the concept of “flourishing” — what it means not just to get by but to actually feel as though you’re thriving.
Allie interrogates what it means to “be enough” and arrives at a tantalizing conclusion: that our endless obsession with self-improvement is actually not helping us feel any better.
Allie dissects the concept of authenticity — a value that many find intrinsically important and want to enact but have no idea where to start.
