Reflections as I Start to Step Away from IPPA's Board

This year, 2024, turns out to be a good year to reflect. I am coming to the end of my time serving on the Board of Directors after 6 or 8 years (can anyone remember? Haha), and I just returned from the European Congress on Positive Psychology (ECPP) in Innsbruck, Austria. A lot of what excited me at ECPP mirrors much of where I see positive psychology itself to have changed in my time on the Board of Directors.? During that stretch of time, I served as the Conference Chair for the 2021 World Congress, which of course was altered substantially by COVID. Without drawing us too deeply into sad reflections, many of us lost friends, family, and other loved ones during the pandemic. And some of us have vivid memories of being prevented or unable to see those dear people to say goodbye or offer solace because of efforts to constrain the spread of the virus. That helpless isolation feels like a metaphor, as well, for those who still hurt or suffer from what they lost during the pandemic. Like many, I have been quick to try to move on to “normal life.” It is worth taking a moment to remember we haven’t all moved on at the same speed or with the same ease.

Well, this is not a very “positive” start to my reflections. Those of you who know me probably are not surprised. I spent the past 20 years or so studying meaning in life, a concept with its roots in suffering and overcoming. The closely related field of existentialism is notorious for its embrace of dark topics such as death, isolation, and uncertainty. For us “meaning types” thriving and hurting have always held hands. It’s not just been meaning types who see this truth, of course. The coexistence of flourishing and suffering was one of the themes of Second Wave Positive Psychology. There have been more waves proposed, which is a lot for such a young field. The desire of the field to soul-search and ask “is this all we’re going to do?” is one of the trends I have seen and been excited about in my time on the Board.

Here are some other reflections, drawn from meetings, corridor conversations, keynotes, symposia, posters, and deep talks late in the night over the past several years, culminating in the ECPP.

1. More Than the Individual. Amidst a packed agenda, I gravitated to the many, many sessions by leaders like Antonella Delle Fave, Judith Mangelsdorf, Lisa Barker, Diane Bowles , Michael Ungar , Andreas Krafft and several others pointing to the power of context. It is fairly common to name-check the idea that context is important, but we need to aim our field at regenerative, systems, contextual, or other ways of understanding the environments that shape wellbeing. Some people talked about 4th?Wave, others systems, and I talked about “Regenerative Positive Psychology” (You can download my article on the topic here, it’s free and open access: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17439760.2024.2365259?src=exp-la). Each approach shared a similar call to action – the necessity to think more broadly, shift our practice and research, and engage more widely with other disciplines and powers to try to do a better job of understanding how people reflect their systems and how we can heal the systems we rely on.

2. We Must Try. There are significant challenges to fulfilling these calls toward context. Nothing that we're tackling right now is easy, whether it is destructive pursuits of profit, rising political violence, war, racism and other injustice, struggling health care, pollution, or climate and environmental collapse. It might feel hopeless, truly futile... we might not see a reversal or healing in our lifetimes. But. We must try! Not for our immediate benefit but for all those who come after us, our who do not have our privilege or access in the world. This need to – and commitment by many to – try is true at both the macro and micro levels. A key example is the ongoing effort for IPPA to become more international. This has been a consistent pressure point. The overwhelming participation of people from WEIRD countries (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic) in the big ticket events like the IPPA World Congress and the ECPP has been widely acknowledged, and remedies have been intentionally pursued. I’ve seen these efforts with my own eyes, and everyone, like myself, who has chaired one of these conferences has tried hard to increase attendance and visibility from everyone, not just the WEIRD ones. My sense is that, like positive psychology in general, we need totally new approaches to make a difference. We need new systems, new voices, new partners, and more. But we will keep trying! We must!

3. People Are Amazing. Being surrounded by such people makes it clear to me that if we do tackle a regenerative, interdisciplinary approach to the systemic challenges we face, We Can Make A Difference! Practically every conversation I had was a revelation of someone who was doing incredible work. Sometimes that work was resource-intensive research with mind-warping statistical power and analysis. Sometimes that work was a non-profit initiative designed to engage strangers in conversations together, or educate and empower under-resourced young people to make an impact on the social world around them, or make it easier for people to do kind acts to heal nature or other people. Whenever I feel dispirited about the world, or about my country, or about some disciplinary field like positive psychology, I remember these people, these amazing people doing incredible, diverse, unexpected, inspiring work. Do we do a good enough job of making sure we hear from everyone doing this work? No. We don’t hear so often about people from under-resourced countries, who do and share their work in the absence of powerful passports or fluency in English. We will try to do better on this. I know it. And can you imagine for a moment the incredible amount of inspiration, encouragement, wisdom, insight, workarounds, programs, cooperatives, teams, and ideas that are out there, just beyond the conference halls?

So, after all of this reflection, I hope that you see, as I do, that the future looks wonderful. But, if you are anything like me, the future also is utterly terrifying. Just like the present moment, the wonderful and the terrifying hold hands together in the future. Right now, there are awful forces at work. And there are beatific forces working just as hard to heal and encourage. The same will be true tomorrow and in 20 years, I guess. But the balance seems important. Wouldn’t we prefer that the wonderful future is like the parent’s hand, large and safe. Like a parent’s hand, a wonderful future’s hand could hold and guide the smaller, perhaps frightened hand of the terrifying future. That would be better than the reverse, right? I’m overworking this metaphor, but I believe that the wonderful future needs help to come to fruition.

I’m convinced that we are the people to help.