About Human Flourishing

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

Search for it and you’ll find no shortage of results — philosophers, positive psychologists, wellness brands, books, podcasts, frameworks, retreats. The space is full.

Look 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? Positive psychology, for all its rigor, has largely been the science of individual flourishing — what it looks like, how to measure it, how it varies.

Important work. But it leaves one question largely unasked.

What does it actually take — in our economies, our institutions, our families — for most of humanity to flourish? Not just the fortunate few.

Scott McIntosh and Angela McIllece arrived at the same question from very different places.

Scott spent decades as an entrepreneur — building companies, helping grow the Conscious Capitalism movement, and traveling widely enough to see poverty up close, not on a page.

Angela spent thirty years as a military spouse, moving more than twenty times across cultures. She raised young children in New Delhi, empty-nested in Bogotá, and discovered along the way that America itself holds more distinct cultures than most people ever get to see. Across all of it, she watched what helped people thrive — and what kept them from it.

Both had seen the same thing from different angles: people flourishing in conditions the developed world would call impossible, and people miserable despite every material advantage. That’s a hard fact for any purely inward account of flourishing to absorb.

Both eventually found their way to Arizona and to the Heroic movement, drawn in by its mission of helping individuals flourish — rooted in ancient wisdom and behavioral science, aimed at the audacious goal of 51% of humanity flourishing by 2051. They lived the work. They believed in it. They still do.

But a question kept surfacing. What about someone living in abject poverty? Heroic’s tools are world-class — and out of reach for someone who can’t meet basic human needs. If poverty is a structural barrier to flourishing, what other structural barriers are there? What do societies need to get right — economically, politically, culturally — for flourishing to become a real possibility for most of humanity, not just the lucky?

As it turned out, no one was really asking those questions — not in any sustained, public way. That gap is why Human Flourishing exists.

Human Flourishing exists to ask the structural questions. What does an economy need to look like for people to flourish? An institution? A family? A culture? And when the evidence points somewhere inconvenient — as it often does — do we follow it anyway, across the lines that usually stop the conversation?

Individual flourishing work is essential. This is the piece that comes after it — bigger, harder, and barely explored.