What goes right

In 1998 a psychologist named Martin Seligman became president of the American Psychological Association and used the position to make a complaint: his field had spent a century studying what goes wrong with people, depression, anxiety, disorder, and almost nothing on what goes right. He called for a positive psychology, the scientific study of what makes life worth living, and within a decade it was a field, with labs, journals, and findings.

His own frame is PERMA, five elements of flourishing that can each be measured and built. Positive emotion. Engagement, the absorption in a task that makes time vanish. Relationships. Meaning, belonging to something larger than yourself. And accomplishment. His earlier work gave the field learned optimism: the finding that pessimists explain bad events as permanent, pervasive and personal, optimists as temporary, specific and external, and that the explanatory style can be learned. And with Christopher Peterson he built the character strengths you met on day twenty-three.

It's a Healing key for a specific reason. Most of this chamber is about what's broken. Seligman's finding was that fixing what's broken gets you to zero, and zero isn't flourishing. The absence of depression isn't happiness. You have to build the other side, and the other side has its own practices: three good things, the gratitude visit, using a signature strength in a new way, savoring. Several of them you've already done this year.

Here's the honest caveat. The field has had its overclaims and its replication troubles, and some of its early findings shrank. The core has held: wellbeing can be built, on purpose, by practice, and it's not the same thing as the absence of illness.