Flourshing

One of the pioneers of positive psychology, Professor Martin Seligman insists he is not recanting the doctrine which has made him a bestselling author and world-renowned expert on optimism but just that we should be focusing less on people's happiness and more on their ability to "flourish". 
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He said he was naive in the past to think wellbeing was based only on mood.
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The word 'happiness' always bothered me, partly because it was scientifically unwieldy and meant a lot of different things to different people, and also because it's subjective.
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The prime minister has long been interested in Seligman's work and first floated the idea of a "happiness index" in 2005. 
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When he was in Downing Street Tony Blair considered the idea but dismissed it as "too flaky" and Cameron has been criticised for focusing on wellbeing as a distraction from the economy. 
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He has admitted that measuring happiness could be seen as "woolly" and "impractical" but insists he wants a gross domestic happiness scale to become as reliable an indicator of a country's progress as its economic output.
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Now the Office of National Statistics has four happiness questions in this year's annual Integrated Household Survey which will be sent out to 200,000 British homes this month.
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Seligman, who has been in touch with the British government over his methods, said he welcomed the move on "both on scientific grounds and on political grounds". 
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But he added that the notion of what made people happy had to be rethought. 
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He said he has become increasingly frustrated with the perception of what he called "happyology" and has written a new book called Flourish to make a distinction.
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I wanted to be much clearer that this was much more than a happyology. 
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What humans want is not just happiness. 
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They want justice, they want meaning. 
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Even depressed people, he said, can flourish. "I think you can be depressed and flourish, I think you can have cancer and flourish, I think you can be divorced and flourish. 
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When we believed that happiness was only smiling and good mood, that wasn't very good for people like me, people in the lower half of positive affectivity.
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When positive emotion was more central to your ideas, one problem was the evidence that most people have a 'set point' or 'set range' for their mood
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This meaning that whatever they do or whatever happens to them, they tend to revert to a certain level of happiness.
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It was while president of the American Psychological Association in 1998 that Seligman began to promote the idea that psychology should be about creating better mental health. 
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He is involved in a project with the US Army to increase levels of resilience and decrease mental health problems among soldiers and there is enormous interest in what positive psychology could achieve in schools.
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Martin Seligman 
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A good idea indeed but not if the surrounding environment is in deep trouble.
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Our world, his context, is in deep trouble
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Difficult to flourish in such an environment.
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It is not impossible
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Just a bit more of a stretch at this time.