About Human Flourishing

Human flourishing is a crowded field. That’s exactly the problem.

Search for “human flourishing” and you will find no shortage of results. Philosophers have written about it for millennia. Positive psychologists have been measuring it for decades. Wellness brands have built businesses around it. Books, podcasts, frameworks, and retreats — the space is full.

Look more closely and you notice something: nearly all of it points in the same direction. Inward. How do I flourish? How do I build a meaningful life, develop resilience, find purpose? The science of positive psychology, for all its rigor and value, has largely been the science of individual flourishing — what it looks like, how it’s measured, how it varies across cultures.

That work is real and important. But it leaves a question largely unasked.

What does it actually take — at the level of societies, economies, families, and institutions — for a majority of humanity to flourish? Not just some of us. All of us.

Scott McIntosh and Angela McIllece arrived at that question from very different directions. Scott spent decades as an entrepreneur and business leader — building companies, helping grow the Conscious Capitalism movement, and traveling globally in ways that brought him face to face with poverty not as a statistic but as a human reality. Angela spent thirty years as a military spouse, moving more than twenty times across cultures — raising young children in New Delhi, embracing empty-nesting in Bogotá, and discovering that America itself contains more distinct cultures than most people ever get to see — watching how people live and what allows them to thrive, or not, across vastly different circumstances.

Both had seen something that stays with you: people flourishing in conditions the developed world would call impossible. And people failing to flourish despite every material advantage. It raises a question that individual self-development — however excellent — cannot answer on its own.

Both eventually found their way to the Heroic movement and to Arizona, drawn by Heroic’s extraordinary commitment to helping individuals flourish — a mission grounded in ancient wisdom, modern behavioral science, and the audacious goal of 51% of humanity flourishing by 2051. They lived the work. They believed in it. They still do.

But a particular question kept surfacing. What about someone living in abject poverty? Heroic’s tools are world-class — and out of reach for someone who cannot meet basic human needs. And if poverty is a structural barrier to flourishing, what other structural barriers exist? What do societies need to get right — in their economies, their governance, their institutions, their culture — for flourishing to become genuinely possible for the many, not just the fortunate?

As it turned out, no one seemed to be asking those questions in a serious, sustained, and honest way. That absence — that gap — is why Human Flourishing exists.

Human Flourishing was born to ask the hard questions. To examine honestly what the structural conditions for widespread human flourishing actually are. To follow the evidence without ideology. To convene people across difference who share a commitment to that inquiry. And to propose — even when it’s uncomfortable — what a world in which a true majority of humanity flourishes might actually require.

The individual work of flourishing is essential. Human Flourishing is what comes next: the harder, larger, and largely unexplored question of what the world itself needs to look like.