Towards 'Flourishing Studies': A network lens onto flourishing

A century and a half of research and discovery.How do we make flourishing legible, observable, tangible?I've written much about the notion and the language of flourishing, the things it draws out like a more muscular form of hope, a more capacious imagination, an understanding of the good life as something more than merely surviving and the corresponding long, ongoing way of experiencing time.But are we speaking about it in too abstract a way?Does it lack substance, some kind of tangibility or a way of realizing it that makes it feel idealistic and naive?Perhaps we know more about what flourishing might mean, but what does it mean we do?Is this more than merely flowery language?I believe in the power of language and philosophy as shaping forces of society (after all, some of our greatest thinker's greatest quotes speak to this effect, e.g., 'words create worlds,' 'The limits of my language mean the limits of my world'), but the questions around the actions that a philosophy of flourishing calls for for the world we are living in and walking into remain important.