The flourishing stack

This is a sample publication entry — placeholder material demonstrating the format. No staff publication record exists yet.

Think of a flourishing life as a stack. The bottom layer is health: physical, mental, social — the runtime everything else executes on. The layers above are games: work, craft, relationships, exploration, status, meaning, play.

The stack metaphor earns its keep with two implications. First, failures propagate upward: an unstable bottom layer degrades every layer above it, which is why health is non-optional. Second, the layers above are where the value lives: nobody runs a stack for the sake of its runtime.

A real publication under this title would develop the metaphor’s limits, too — the ways lives are not software, and the places the layering breaks down. That work has not been done yet, which is exactly why this entry is labelled a sample.