A New Project on Human Flourishing
In recent years I’ve developed an interest in reading more philosophy and the classics, with an eye toward expanding beyond the Western canon to a broad survey of thought and wisdom from around the world. Part of that was a drive to be a lifelong learner. Another was to take seriously the idea of a fully examined life, and making the best I can of myself as I move beyond the child raising years. While I have no desire to become one of the grind-set bros, faux-stoics, or some kind of insecure soul projecting a cringe-inducing alpha/sigma vibe, I do find value in legitimate self-improvement. Sadly, so much of that space is filled with self-help books written by grifters and con artists, taking a few nuggets of wisdom and mixing it with a bunch of superstitious or pseudoscientific woo to milk people of their time and money with empty promises to make them whatever they think their best lives look like today.
What so many seem not to understand is the wisdom and knowledge to better oneself is available to anyone without having to spend a dime. Still, it isn’t inexpensive. It costs what is perhaps your most precious resource: time. It takes time to collect the information. It takes time to apply it to your life. It takes time to reap the benefits. But in the end, I deem it worthwhile to dedicate some of your precious time to make even one part of your life better.
At one time I would have said the most difficult part of the effort was compiling all that information into one place. It’s still a job, but if there’s one thing recent AI technologies have helped us, it’s the ability to gather and present information from a wide variety of sources, given a good set of prompts or questions to find them. So, I started asking questions with a couple of the better LLMs, and finding sources. Some of the sources continue to come from contemporary self-help literature, but it is possible to dig out current peer-reviewed research along with works that have lasted over the centuries.
It is a tendency of mine to ruminate on projects like this for ages without actually doing anything about it, or to take a few personal actions that have slight benefit but fade into the background. This time, though, I wondered what it might look like if I dug up the information I could find, grouped it into an initial set of areas of self-improvement, and just put it out there in all its imperfection. I also wanted to so in a way that avoided the grift game, so it has to be freely available. After all, it’s already out there, just not collected into one place.
In the coming weeks, I hope to release what I asked LLMs to collect and organize for me, what I’m calling the OSS Guide to Human Flourishing. It’s raw, it’s not fully edited, but putting it out there in all its Version One glory. (I already think I want to rename it to The Open Source Guide to Human Flourishing.) Because it came together from multiple AI chats, it’s an organizational mess. That’s fine. I’ll be uploading it all to a GitHub repository and putting it under a Creative Commons license so anyone can use, edit, update, or otherwise help fix it. I’ll be doing the same. It’s a work in progress, in need of many iterations to get it right, but I think it’s a good starting point for anyone who wants to explore the human experience.
The first section will look at the physical, mental, and social aspects of life, meaning and purpose, systems to manage it all, and psychological pitfalls. Future sections will tackle areas of life like financial well being, grief and loss, chronic health issues and disabilities, work and career, human intimacy, parenting, digital life, creativity and play, aging and mortality, identity and belonging, spirituality and existential questions, and what to do when systems fail. All will be presented as neutrally as possible. For my own part, I’ll offer personal applications as a Western man from the Judeo-Christian tradition outside of the published work. I hope others will do the same from their own points of view.
Once it’s published on GitHub, I’ll begin putting it out in easily digestible sections on social media. This space is where the idea will get introduced, and where I’ll go into greater depth on the project and work out in public how I’d like to edit an manage it. I hope it becomes a resource people find helpful, and that a community forms around to make it better with each iteration.
