Flourishing in Tension: embracing duality in the pursuit of human wellbeing
Inspired by The Global Flourishing Study and recent insights from Professor Byron Johnson.
When we speak of human flourishing, it’s tempting to imagine a life free of friction - one where joy, health, purpose, and security flow without resistance. But as the data from The Global Flourishing Study and a growing body of global scholarship reveal, the reality is more complex, more human, and, perhaps, more hopeful.
During a recent panel discussion on the study’s findings, Professor Byron Johnson of Baylor University offered a striking reminder:
“Flourishing is not the absence of suffering or struggle.”
This statement is a profound reframing of what it means to live a flourishing life. To fully understand this, we must explore the role of polarity and duality in human experience.
The myth of the untroubled life
Popular conversation around wellbeing often promotes an idealised version of flourishing, one scrubbed clean of challenge or contradiction. But flourishing is not a linear path toward perpetual ease - a life with no drama, no dips, and no doubt. But the reality is that life includes both good and difficult moments. Life is full of opposites like joy and sadness, success and failure, and both are part of growing and living well.
It is precisely through engaging with life’s dualities that we grow in character, deepen in empathy, and clarify our sense of purpose.
Polarity thinking: holding both truths
Polarity thinking, a concept drawn from systems theory, helps illuminate this truth. Rather than viewing wellbeing as a matter of choosing one side of a spectrum (e.g., happiness over sadness, success over failure), polarity thinking invites us to hold both ends as essential and interdependent.
In the context of flourishing, this means recognising that:
Resilience is forged through adversity, not in its absence.
Meaning often emerges in moments of pain, not just celebration.
Belonging includes both the comfort of acceptance and the discomfort of growth.
Rather than treating struggle as the enemy of flourishing, we can begin to see it as one of its conditions.
The role of suffering in a flourishing life
Flourishing, as defined by The Global Flourishing Study, includes domains such as purpose, virtue, and character — dimensions that are not easily developed in comfort alone. Those who score highly in these areas often report stories of perseverance, loss, recovery, and transformation.
This isn’t about romanticising suffering, but rather acknowledging its growth potential. As Professor Johnson suggests, we must let go of the assumption that struggle signals a failure of wellbeing.
Instead, we can ask:
“What is this tension inviting me to become?”
Flourishing beyond the individual
This reframing also has implications for how we design systems, policies, and cultures that support flourishing. In organisational life, for example, we must shift from binary thinking (e.g., “Are our people thriving or burning out?”) toward a more subtle model that embraces the complexity of what is going on:
People may be deeply engaged and emotionally exhausted at the same time.
A team may be high-performing and experiencing interpersonal conflict simultaneously.
An organisation may be making meaningful progress while also confronting painful truths.
To support flourishing, leaders must learn to navigate - not eliminate - these polarities.
Living into the contradiction
What if flourishing is not a destination, but a rhythm? What if it’s less about arriving at peace and more about learning to live well with contradiction?
When we let go of the ideal of a perfect, uninterrupted life, we make space for a deeper kind of flourishing, one that is generous, flexible, and real. We stop chasing a version of wellbeing that excludes half our humanity and instead build a vision that honours the full spectrum of experience.
Conclusion: A more courageous definition
The Global Flourishing Study gives us data, yes, but it also gives us language. Language to challenge dominant narratives. Language to rehumanise wellbeing. And language to remind ourselves, as Professor Johnson does, that flourishing is not the absence of struggle. It is the art of living through struggle with dignity, purpose, and love.
In a world craving certainty, this vision of flourishing calls for courage. It asks us to embrace the both/and, the messy middle, the sacred tension.
Because in the end, it is not in avoiding our shadows, but in learning to walk with them, that we truly flourish.
ELLIE MASON is a leadership development facilitator and coach, and an organisational design consultant. She supports the change-makers (people and culture leads, strategy and org development teams, and executives) to design and intentionally structure the organisation to align its strategy, people, processes, and culture. As a leadership development facilitator and coach, you can find Ellie running small group coaching programs and facilitated team workshops, where she encourages leaders and teams to build cognitive capacity in order to strengthen capability and close the knowing-doing gap.