What Is Prosperity?

June 18, 2025

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Discussion

Prosperity is an abundance of good stuff.

As much as you need + the ability to get more.

This is, of course, a simplistic definition. Which good stuff? And from who’s perspective shall we do the accounting? Certainly their are luxuries considered the peak of prosperity, enjoyed right up to and through the fall of all ‘great’ civilizations. Many are the stories of pleasures stolen from others, plunging the loser into hardship or death. Can these truly be considered prosperity? And how do such images of prosperity influence our culture?

Inversely, is there a way of defining prosperity such that its pursuit makes the systems which deliver good stuff more resilient and productive?

My hypothesis: it is not the lack of resources or technology that limit our access to good stuff but ideological divides within the idea of ‘good stuff’ that keep us from collectively evolving our relationship with it.

Business ‘prosperity’ is at war with environmental ‘prosperity’. Work productivity is in competition with family social health. Short of humanity achieving sudden spiritual unity, these conflicts seem inevitable and yet these conflicts are not the inherent natue of the relationship. Industrialization dumped chemicals into the environment but also it provided a path for the next generation, new skills and resources that supported the design of technologies that don’t.

My interest is in how these competing visions of what is good move in and out of relationship with each other. I want to observe them, like organisms on the field of human culture in their dance for supremacy. Competing, waring, forming alliances, making babies. Before we can manipulate them it helps to see them clearly, to know their boundaries and the mechanisms through which they operate.

The following is a group activity for studying collective relationship with the idea of prosperity. It asks simply, “What is prosperity?” and asks everyone to map their reponses at the intersection of scale and generativity.

Find it here.