Can one flourish at the end of life? What Aristotle—and modern science—teach us
Aristotle referred to the full exercise of human faculties as flourishing. Today, a group of philosophers and physicians is investigating whether this flourishing is possible—and perhaps even uniquely possible—during the final years of life. This is what they have discovered.
Gabriel Serrano
Can one flourish at the end of life? The question is not new. Aristotle asked it twenty-four centuries ago. The Stoics asked it. Cicero asked it, already seventy years old, in his treatise De senectute. And it was asked once again, just a few months ago, in an academic article published by Symons, Rhee, Tanous, Balboni, and VanderWeele in Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics (2024). What the authors have found —bringing together positive psychology, palliative medicine, and classical philosophy— is well worth the attention of anyone looking at this stage of life with seriousness.
What Aristotle meant by "flourishing"
When Aristotle speaks of eudaimonia, it is usually translated as "happiness," but that is a convenient and somewhat weak translation. The Greek word rather means something like the full exercise of human faculties in accordance with virtue. For Aristotle, a person flourishes when they think well, love well, create well, live together well, and do so in a stable manner over the course of an entire lifetime.
Three things are important here. First: flourishing is not a state of mind, it is a way of acting. Second: it is not measured moment by moment, it is measured over time. Third —and this is the decisive point for this conversation—: the flourishing of a life is only known when that life is complete. "One swallow does not make a summer," Aristotle says. The good life is the entire life well-lived.
The modern discovery: the end matters
This classical intuition —that the final stage of life carries a disproportionate weight when judging how well we have lived— has been confirmed by contemporary psychology in surprising ways. Tyler VanderWeele, Professor of Public Health at Harvard, has been directing the Human Flourishing Program since 2016 and has developed a framework that combines six dimensions: happiness and life satisfaction, physical and mental health, meaning and purpose, virtue and character, close relationships, and material stability. It is the most serious and validated framework available today to discuss what it means for a life to go well.
What his group has found when applying it to older adults —in data gathered from more than 200,000 people across 22 countries through the Global Flourishing Study— is revealing: although physical health tends to decline with age, other dimensions —especially meaning, virtue, and relationships— can reach their peak in the later years. It is not true that flourishing is a matter of youth. In many cases, it is precisely the opposite.
"The challenge is not to live more years, but to live them with more depth."
Three dimensions of flourishing that grow with age
1. Meaning and purpose
After sixty-five, many people describe a new feeling: it is no longer about what they want to achieve, but what they want to leave behind. The question shifts perspective. And that question —what legacy, what imprint, what meaning— is better equipped to be answered from maturity than from one's thirties. There is time, there is perspective, there is less rush.
2. Character and virtue
Aristotle says that virtues are cultivated through habit. Prudence, fortitude, temperance, justice —and, Christian thinkers would add, faith, hope, love— are muscles trained throughout life. Maturity is, literally, the moment when these muscles are more trained than ever. Flourishing here is not something that begins: it is something harvested.
3. Deep relationships
The final stage of life is often the phase in which the relationships we have built can reach their maximum density. There is time for long phone calls, for reconciliations, for conversations with grandchildren that do not fit into a Sunday dinner. Symons et al. note that many older adults describe their relationships after retirement as the deepest of their entire lives.
And so, what is needed?
Flourishing in maturity is not automatic. Health may not cooperate; losses may come; society may have forgotten. It requires an inner decision and, if possible, good company. Three things are especially helpful:
Return to the big questions. Not to find definitive answers, but to keep the question alive. Philosophy, history, and the search for meaning are the three fields where it is easiest to return to that conversation.
Cultivate an aesthetic gaze. Art, music, and nature are three ways to experience wonder —and wonder is, according to contemporary studies, one of the strongest predictors of well-being after sixty.
Be in company. Flourishing is very difficult in solitude. Community —of peers, of allies, of people who are also looking at this stage with open eyes— is one of the conditions for flourishing.
Why Thenomba Senior is built upon this
When we designed the Senior journey, we started from an intuition that we now also find in the most recent papers: that maturity is not the eve of the end, but a stage with its own vocation. A stage in which, if one wishes, one can flourish in a way that is not possible in any other.
That is why the twelve stages of the journey are not a list of disconnected topics. They are the twelve fields where, according to twenty-five centuries of humanistic tradition, a flourishing life is cultivated: purpose, identity, thought, meaning, memory, citizenship, science, mind, beauty, nature, creativity, and legacy.
Aristotle's question is not an ancient one. It is the most contemporary question there is. And you have, at this stage of your life, everything needed to answer it.
If you feel like taking a step further, there are two readings that will be highly rewarding: the first explains in detail the six dimensions of the Harvard framework applied to this stage of life; the second translates into Spanish the twelve-question questionnaire with which the Harvard team measures flourishing. You can complete it in five minutes —it is not an exam, it is a mirror—.
Main source: Symons, X., Rhee, J., Tanous, A., Balboni, T., VanderWeele, T. J. (2024). Flourishing at the end of life. Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics, 45(5), 401–425. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Books I and X.
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